Greensboro Riots 1969
May 19-20, 1969 Violence erupts after weeks of community meetings and protests over administrators not allowing a student election to stand at Dudley High School. Students are arrested. Police are accused of misconduct.
May 21 Between sixty and seventy-five students from Lincoln Middle School, an all-black school located on Lincoln Street, engaged in a picketing demonstration in the front of their school’s campus. Similar episodes of student protest had been occurring consistently for several weeks following the results of the student government election held on May 2. In fact, by that point, the high school students were receiving protest support from students at NC A&T University. In addition, dozens of students from both Dudley High and NC A&T had been forcefully arrested by police for violating the North Carolina General Statute which outlawed disturbing a public school
The source of the protest could be traced to the decision made by the faculty-student election committee to deny the name of African American junior Claude Barnes on the ballot for student body president. Although Barnes, then the junior class president, received six hundred write-in votes from his fellow students, his votes were not considered valid by the election committee and thereby an opponent who received no more than two hundred votes was crowned the victor.
Later that afternoon the group of student protesters had grown to over 125 carrying signs that read, “EDUCATE, NOT DICTATE” and “RETURN OUR PRESIDENT FROM EXILE.”The principal requests police aid. Rock throwing erupts. Tear gas is used to disperse the crowd. Activity moves to A&T. The mayor requests National Guard assistance. By 8 p.m., police barricade streets in the area to prevent white motorists from traveling through. Late that evening, police and the National Guard begin receiving sniper fire. Sometime late that night or early the next morning, Willie Grimes, A&T student is shot in the back of the head.
[26]
May 22 Students bring Grimes by car to Moses Cone Hospital. He is pronounced dead on arrival at 1:30 a.m . Another student is shot in the leg. Reports of sniper fire continue until dawn. At 10 a.m., the mayor declares a state of emergency. A curfew is imposed. That afternoon, A&T officials announce the school will close as of 6 p.m. May 23. Gunfire continues throughout the evening between students and police.
May 23: Five police officers are wounded, one seriously, when they are shot near Scott Hall at 1 a.m. The National Guard sweeps Cooper and Scott halls at 7 a.m., fearing a large number of firearms are being stored. Students are taken downtown and released that afternoon. Nine weapons, three of them operable, are found.
Aug. 26: The police chief announces that findings in the joint police and SBI investigation into Willie Grimes' death are inconclusive.
Oct. 3-4: A state arm of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights holds hearings in Greensboro on the "disturbances" at Dudley and A&T. Grimes is mentioned little in the testimony. “It is a sad commentary,” the committee concluded, “that the only group in the community who would take the Dudley students seriously were the students at A&T State University.” [26]
March 1970: The committee concludes an underlying system of inequality in the city created conditions that caused violence to erupt. It offers recommendations on changes..[27]
In 2007, Greensboro voters elected the first African-American mayor of the city, Yvonne Johnson.
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