Five decades ago, the black residents of Greensboro, North Carolina decided they’d had enough. In May 1969, a controversial election for student body president at Dudley High School turned into an open revolt against police repression and racial segregation.
It culminated on May 21, 1969, when the National Guard mobilized and stormed the campus of historically black North Carolina A&T State University. The affair, which came to be known as the A&T/Dudley Revolt, is largely forgotten history.
When the revolt occurred, Greensboro — a small city in the center of North Carolina — was no stranger to struggle. It’s famous for being the birthplace of the Sit-In Movement, which began when four black A&T students demanded equal service at a segregated lunch counter in 1960. But almost a decade later, countless black residents — especially young people — were frustrated by the slow pace of change.
“Even though the Civil Rights Movement was successful in breaking down certain legal barriers to public accommodations, these changes did not bring about basic change in the overall American political economy,” Greensboro native and retired political science professor Claude Barnes wrote in a 1997 book that addressed the revolt, which was a big part of his life. “In short, the late ‘60s in Greensboro was a period of tremendous hardship for the city's black population. After a massive civil rights struggle in which it appeared that fundamental changes would be forthcoming, in reality only superficial changes in the status quo were allowed.”
That’s part of the reason why Barnes — then a 17-year-old junior at Greensboro’s then all-black Dudley High School — ran for student body president on a “black power” platform in May 1969. And he won in a landslide.
But the school refused to recognize him. Dudley’s election committee said that Barnes “lacked the qualifications to be a candidate for student council president” even though he was an honor student and was involved in several student clubs, author William Chafe wrote in Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.
While Barnes wasn’t on the official ballot, he received 600 write-in votes and dominated the election, according to Chafe. The school named another student as president anyway, and several students including Barnes walked out in protest.
“I was shocked that they wouldn’t let my name be on the ballot,” Barnes, who is now 67, tells Teen Vogue.
Barnes knows why they wouldn’t recognize his candidacy.
“School officials cited my subversive activities as the reason for the exclusion,” he wrote in his book. “The content of the ‘subversive’ activities was my association with a youth organization affiliated with the Greensboro Association of Poor People. According to these black administrators, I was a suspected Black Panther Party member.”
But Barnes wasn’t a Black Panther. The attempt by school administrators to tamp down on radical students backfired, as students quickly rallied to the cause, protesting and boycotting school, he says.