JoAnne Smart Drane '60 and Bettye Ann Tillman '60 were the pioneers. The first African-American students to attend UNCG (or Woman's College as it was known then). They made their bold first steps in 1956 — four years before the Greensboro Woolworth's sit-ins made headlines. While the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision paved the way for JoAnne and Bettye Ann to come to a previously segregated school, not everyone was ready to accept the change. In the past JoAnne has written about what it was like to walk into an environment where she had no idea how she would be accepted. Now, she, along with Margaret Patterson Horton '61 and Zelma Amey Holmes '61 — the three surviving members of the first group of African-American women at UNCG — are recording their experiences in a book. The fears. The challenges. The triumphs.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth's sit-in as well as the 50th Reunion of the Class of 1960. In order to mark where 50 years have brought us, we asked JoAnne for an excerpt from the book in progress that would give a sense of what it was like to be here in 1956. What follows is an eye-opening look at the attitudes and behind-the-scenes correspondence with Interim Chancellor W.W. Pierson Jr. that preceded JoAnne and Bettye Ann's arrival.

On the very same day that major newspapers in North Carolina carried the headlines that two Negro students would be entering Woman's College in September 1956, Sam O. Worthington, a prominent member of the State of North Carolina Utilities Commission fired off a letter to Miss Mildred Newton, Woman's College director of admissions. The four-paragraph, full-page letter read in part:

“First of all I would like to know what arrangements for bath and toilet facilities will be made for the Negroes. Will they be given free access to the bathrooms, toilet facilities and the bath tubs which the white girls will also have to use? Will the white girls be required or if they choose to do so, will they be permitted to room with the Negro girls? Will the Negro girls be permitted to invite Negro boys to the institution for dates, and will they share with the white girls and the white boys the parlor facilities? Will the Negro girls be permitted to invite Negro boys to social functions, and if banquets, will they sit around the table with a black spot here and a white spot there?”

One can almost hear in Worthington's words the sheer astonishment and amazement that the college would dare entertain the thought of Negro girls using the very same bathroom facilities, toilets and bathtubs as white people! Surely, this could never be a consideration for the South's white daughters. The thought was too preposterous and too outrageous to imagine. And, heaven forbid, Negro boys being permitted to set foot on the same campus with white girls, possibly in the same room and perhaps even sitting side by side at the same table. What horrors! Who would allow this to happen? Unimaginable!

Although Mr. Worthington's letter was addressed to Miss Mildred Newton, the director of admissions at Woman's College, Worthington's position on the State Utilities Commission and his status as a former nine-term member of the North Carolina State Legislature elicited a response directly from W. W. Pierson, acting chancellor. After informing Mr. Worthington that Miss Newton was “not acting from personal choice” but merely carrying out policies of the “Federal courts, the University Trustees and the University Administration,” Chancellor Pierson goes on to say:

“I wish to assert unequivocally that no Negroes have been invited to apply. Let me say further that application for admission to the Woman's College in no case could be designated as ‘freely accepted’.”

Dr. Pierson wished to make it clear that the college did not have a choice in this matter. He wanted Worthington to know that if the college could have done otherwise, it would have done so. Pierson also indicates that the college had been in touch with other southern institutions seeking guidance relative to their policies, practices and procedures pertaining to the admission of Negro students. Regarding Worthington’s questions about bathroom facilities, Chancellor Pierson wrote:

“The two negro students who have been admitted will be housed in a wing in Shaw Dormitory. This wing is separated from the rest of the dormitory by a partition in which there are swinging doors. The two negro girls who have been admitted will room together and share a private bath. Other rooms on the same floor of this wing will be occupied by graduate students. White girls will not be allowed to room with the negro students and no white students will be housed in the wing set aside for negro students. These are positive answers and represent policies as nearly similar to the ones in operation at Chapel Hill as we found it possible to set up.”

Mr. Worthington was not the only white person concerned about the admittance and treatment of these two Negro girls to the previously all-white Woman's College. E.S. Askew of Windsor, a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Consolidated University of North Carolina sent a hand-written two-page letter to Chancellor Pierson along with two racist treatises that he had written. He asks Pierson to take the time to read both of these enclosures about the results of “amalgamation.”

In the letter to Pierson, Askew asserts:

“I do not know a negro family in this neighborhood (A good average in N.C.) in which the children are not dishonest and in which the whole family has sextual (sic) immorality and even incest to a large degree. And I do not know a single negro (sic) (even the preachers and educators) who does not believe in conjuration … Of course there is (if we do not shut our eyes) a downgrading of white people, but why give it acceleration by mixing with the negro? But the whole controversy misses the main point — that amalgamation means the lowering of our civilization & the loss of our world leadership. If we are willing to pay the price — go ahead!

Joining these two alarmists, Worthington and Askew, concerning the perception of the disastrous perils of race mixing and desegregation of the Woman's College, Dr. Clifton F. West of Kinston expressed his repulsion about “chocolate, malotto (sic) or black being mixed in our white social pattern.” Among the comments in a letter he wrote to Chancellor Pierson on Sept. 21, 1956, is the following:

“You let the two or three negro girls have their dates and escorts all over W.C. and to parties and dances and soon you will have ‘hell to pay’ around your College.”

Pierson also received correspondence from J. S. Kuykendall, director of the Patriots of North Carolina, requesting that Pierson respond to three questions sending a self-addressed stamped envelope for the convenience of his reply.

The letter included this statement: “At a meeting of the Trustees of the University of North Carolina held in Raleigh last Monday, I am informed by one of the truytees (sic) attending the meeting that it was stated in your presence that the Negro girl who was to attend the Woman's College from Raleigh was being sent there by the NAACP and that all her expenses were being paid by the NAACP.”

Pierson responded that he had heard “a remark made which assumed that the NAACP was giving economic support to one of the students.” As that student of reference, I can unequivocally refute the assertion that the NAACP provided any financial support for my college education. It is understandable that there might be curiosity about the ability of my parents, a domestic and a chauffeur, being able to finance a college education. But they did so with a lot of sacrifice, loans and hard work.

I do not wish to infer that the comments made by these four men (Worthington, Askew, West and Kuykendall) reflected the feelings and attitudes of all white people of that era toward Negroes. Neither do I wish to suggest that these were only isolated instances. From my own experiences, this thinking was quite pervasive at the time. I certainly wanted to think that there were other voices representing a different viewpoint. In time I came to know that there were some white students and faculty who disagreed with the positions in question. But during the research of Chancellor Pierson's papers I found limited, if any, written support for admitting black students to this or other previously all-white institutions expressed outright.

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Student leaders were interviewed and quoted in the press. The general consensus was that students would react with neither hostility nor enthusiasm. “Calm acceptance” was predicted to be the outcome. Terry Ann Garrison of Greensboro, president of the sophomore class, summed it up saying: “Reaction to having Negroes on the campus will be a purely personal matter with each student.”

The student leaders' prediction of “calm acceptance” turned out to be the reality. When Bettye Ann and I arrived on campus on Sept. 13, 1956, there was nothing going on to indicate that it was not a typical freshman arrival day on campus. We reported to the Administration Building, received directions to our dorm, Shaw Hall, and started moving in. All around the Freshman Quad, cars were being unloaded, luggage carted up steps, coveted close parking spaces being sought, clusters of people hugging and saying their goodbyes. If people were staring at or watching us, we pretended not to notice or pay attention. We proceeded as if it were normal for us to be here. Except for the unexpected overheated car incident that had occurred earlier in the day, the extraordinary significance of this moment, on the surface, appeared quite ordinary.

State troopers or police did not accompany Bettye Ann and me when we came to Woman's College. We came with our families just like the other students. North Carolina's Governor Luther Hodges, though opposed to desegregation, did not stand in a doorway of the college to block our entrance, as Governor Wallace of Alabama would do in 1963, seven years after WC had reluctantly opened its doors to its first black students. There were no burning crosses, no mobs of angry whites throwing stones, spitting, shoving and hurling racial epithets at us and our families. There was little hint of overt resistance to our arrival on that clear sunny autumn day in September of 1956. There was also much that Bettye Ann and I did not know at that time about how we would be treated. We came not expecting a red carpet welcome. But we did come knowing that the doors that had been officially closed to blacks for the entire history of the College since its opening in 1892 would now be open. A new era had begun.

Past present
Want to know more? Read JoAnne's account about her first weeks at WC, reprinted from the spring 1980 alumni news.