Not Everything is Black and White
Students at dorm party, circa late 1960s - early 1970s.
During the tumultuous year of 1968, interactions between white and black students across the country made the difference between peaceful collaboration and violent antagonism. Although NC State escaped the upheaval that plagued places like Kent University, black and white students shared space in interesting and varied ways.[1]
In one particularly passionate call-to-arms in The Technician in April of 1968, an unnamed editor wrote, “It looks as though the niggers and the honkies aren’t ever going to realize they’re both people.”[2] However this bald and grim indictment was untrue in many cases. In many (if not all) cases, white students advocated for the rights of their black classmates to spaces all across campus.
White students were often motivated to express their support for civil rights because their friends were denied equality at social establishments near campus. White students frequently stood up for their black classmates at establishments on Hillsborough Street that were reluctant to serve black patrons. In one 1968 newspaper article about The Jolly Knave, several white students were eager to inform the newspaper that they felt black students were being discriminated against and that they would support black students’ right to peacefully protest the following week.[3] White students often expressed the most umbrage when their black friends could not join them for social gatherings on Hillsborough. However, it would take many years of demonstrations and administration pressure before black students had equal access to gathering spaces on and around campus.
Letter from Linda Brieaddy to Dr. James Maddox, concerning racial discrimination from her landlords, 1967.
White students also took more ideological stands for their black counterparts. In a letter to The Technician, reprinted in its 30 October 1968 issue, a group of white NC State students blasted the student-run newspaper for its self-involvement, its apathy, and its placidity. The group, who wish to be distinguished from those “who must vent their racial prejudice in a superabundance of four-letter words,” urged the newspaper to “knock on the doors of the all-white Wolfpack Club and ask why it has not one Negro,” to “send a Negro down to the football team and see if he gets on,” and to “ask why it is that when it comes to washing trashcans, moving bricks around, sweeping floors, and digging weeds the Personnel Office goes out of its way to hire blacks.”[4] In this way, the white students behind the letter advocated for black access to social spaces, athletic spaces, and workplace spaces.
In some cases, white students and faculty had to fight for the right to invite black friends and colleagues into their own personal spaces on and around campus. On one occasion in 1967, a white faculty member and his wife invited two chemistry graduate students, a white man and a black woman, to their home on O’Berry Street. When they saw the students, the landlords insisted that they did not want to see the young man and his “Negro wife” on their property again. The landlords then told Lawrence and Linda Brieaddy that they, “under no circumstances would allow [the Brieaddys] to have Negros in [their] apartment.” The Brieaddys chose to move, which solved their immediate problem, but still meant that some spaces were limited even to white proponents of racial equality.[5]
82nd Airborne marking on Hillsborough Street during demonstration following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968.
Not all white Raleighites were so progressive, however. One Technician editor indicted ACC referees for being “incompetent, possibly bigoted, and occasionally show[ing] signs of trying to fight the Civil War over again on a basketball court.”[6] In May of 1969, The Technician reprinted a letters to the editor from a student about the impropriety of having black women clean white men’s dorms and white women cleaning up after black men.[7] These writers, and many other white students, faculty, and administrators, were concerned about black men and women sharing space with white men and women.
White resistance to blacks in public spaces seemed unyielding nationally as well. Another article, reprinted in The Technician from United Press International in Washington, DC, reported in a despondent tone that, as a result of the waves of racial violence wracking the country, there existed “continued white resistance to integration” and that “integration was coming into disfavor as a word and as a goal.”[8]
Black and white interactions were not unanimous or simplistic anywhere in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and NC State was no exception. Blacks and whites continued to both cooperate and clash over contested spaces on campus.
[1] Alice Elizabeth Reagan, North Carolina State University: A Narrative History (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1987), 182.
[2] Unknown, “Things Look Pretty Black,” The Technician, 8 April 1968, accessed October 24, 2014. http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/technician-v47bn64-1968-04-08.
[3] Bob Spann, “Jolly Knave Integration Try Fails,” The Technician, 26 February 1968, accessed 24 October 2014. http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/technician-v47bn46-1968-02-26.
[4] Unknown, letter to the editor, The Technician, 30 October 1968, accessed 24 October 2014. http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/technician-v53n19b-1968-10-30.
[5] Letter from Linda Brieaddy to Dr. James Maddox, Chairman of the Good Neighbor Council,” 9 October 1967, Folder 2, Box 1, UA 022.053 University Committee Records, North Carolina State University Special Collections, Raleigh, NC.
[6] Joe Lewis, “In this corner…” The Technician, 15 January 1969, accessed 24 October 2014. http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/technician-v53n41-1969-01-15.
[7] Jim Bordeaux and Wesley McLeod, “Letters to the Editors,” The Technician, 14 May 1969, accessed 24 October 2014. http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/technician-v53n81-1969-05-14.
[8] Unknown, “One black, one white, separate and unequal…and we are one year closer.” The Technician, 28 February 1969, accessed 24 October 2014. http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/technician-v53n52-1969-02-28.