Warren Ashby

Warren Ashby was born in Newport News, Virginia on May 15, 1920. He received his Bachelors of Arts degree in English from Maryville College in 1939, his Bachelors of Divinity degree in Christian Ethics and Social Problems from Yale University in 1942, and his Doctorate of Philosophy degree in Religion and Philosophy, also from Yale, in 1947.

Ashby teaching, 1969

Ashby began his teaching career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1947 before transferring to the Woman’s College (now UNCG) in 1949 to be an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy. Ordained as a Methodist minister, Ashby specialized in Western Ethics and was known to sometimes officiate wedding ceremonies for his students. In 1958, he was promoted to full professor. Following his interest in the life of UNC President Frank Graham, Ashby took a research leave from the college in 1960 to begin collecting materials for an upcoming biography.
Upon his return to Woman’s College in 1961, Ashby continued teaching in the Department of Philosophy. In 1966, he was appointed director of the UNCG honors program and would serve in that role until 1970 when he became the Director of the Residential College (later renamed in his honor in 2007). Ashby’s long standing service to the university was formally acknowledged in 1967 when he received the UNCG Alumni Teaching Excellence Award.  He was recognized again in 1982 with the Gladys Strawn Bullard Award which honors faculty and staff who have provided outstanding leadership and service to the university.

Along with his distinguished teaching career, Ashby was known as a leading advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in Greensboro. He often held group meetings at his house with students from Woman’s College, Greensboro College and Bennett College to discuss the current social and political climate. In 1955, when it was considered dangerous for a white male to speak out in favor of civil rights in the South, Ashby wrote a letter to the editor of the Greensboro Daily News strongly endorsing an integrated public education. That same year, Ashby led a “faculty council resolution” supporting desegregation of UNC campuses. In the 1960s, during Greensboro’s civil rights demonstrations, Ashby served on several biracial committees “seeking racial harmony in the city.” He continued to push for complete desegregation on the university level through the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, he advocated for a quota system that would guarantee minority employment.

Dr. Warren Ashby died October 3, 1985.

Other notable accomplishments of Dr. Warren Ashby:

• Ford Fellowship for Princeton University in Hartford College (1952-1953)

• Consultant for the National Family Life Education Project (ASHA) (1953-1955)

• President of the Family Service-Travelers Aid Association of Greensboro (1958)

• Consultant/Associate Director for Southern Student Human Relations Summer Seminars at Ohio State University and the University of Illinois (1958-1959)

• Director of the International Conferences and Seminars program for Southern Asia in the International Affairs Divisions of the American Friends Service Committee (1964-1966)

WC Students, Tate Street, and Desegregation in 1963

While the February 1960 sit-in at Greensboro’s F.W. Woolworth store downtown is well known, fewer people are knowledgeable about a second round of protests that escalated in Greensboro in the Spring of 1963. A number of Woman’s College (WC) students participated in the 1960 sit-ins, but the 1963 movement hit the students of WC a bit closer to home. While the protests stretched around town, one aspect of the movement was primarily targeted at businesses located on Tate Street, in the area known as “The Corner.”

Chancellor Otis Singletary

On February 27, 1963, 23 WC students (most African American) wrote Chancellor Otis Singletary asking him to immediately begin working towards desegregation of the Corner, a business area adjacent to the WC campus. The students wrote “This college has accepted us as students, therefore, as members of the Woman’s College community. Since we are accepted as such, we feel that the college has the responsibility of seeing that we receive the same privileges as any other member of this community. As of now, we are not granted such opportunities.” They added that “the decision to accept Negro students to Woman’s College implies the decision to give them your full moral support, not just a limited, partial support.”

The letter to Singletary earned a swift response. On March 13, he set up a meeting with a local business owner and Dean of Students Katherine Taylor. In the meeting, Singletary stressed that he recognized that he had no official authority to dictate policy to the business owners of the Corner, but he wished to request “unofficially that all students at the Woman’s College be served at the Corner eating places and admitted to the Cinema Theatre.” Singletary warned that, if the present segregationist policy continued, the students would likely begin picketing and boycotting these businesses.

On that same day - March 13, 1963 - the WC Student Government Association passed a resolution urging Singletary to "use his authority and influence as a college official" to convince owners of business on the Corner to desegregate their facilities. Specifically, they called out two restaurants - the Apple House and the Town and Country – as well as the Cinema Theatre on Tate Street. SGA’s resolution carried the same argument as the letter from the students to Singletary – the WC is integrated and its local businesses should be too.

SGA resolution calling for a boycott
of segregated businesses on Tate Street, 1963

 Three days later on Thursday, May 16, 1963, the WC SGA issued a call for "selective buying campaign" directed at the Tate Street merchants. On that same day, the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants Association passed resolutions calling for equal access in all local businesses. Coinciding with a week of massive marches and demonstrations around Greensboro, approximately two dozen WC students picketed the offending Tate Street businesses they considered part of their campus community. One local businessman wrote Dean of Students Taylor that “it was disturbing, to say the least, to observe the fine looking young ladies harassing these local businessmen by parading before their places of business today … They appear determined to destroy our way of life and some of the business people whose taxes are educating them.”

Rallies and protests continued throughout Greensboro during the summer months. On May 22, 1963, more than two thousand African Americans of all ages and classes silently marched to downtown Greensboro to show their dedication to achieving racial equality, making it the largest march in the city’s history. A few days later, 1,643 white residents of Greensboro allowed their names to be published by the Greensboro Daily News in a full-page and partial-page ad in support of the integration of Greensboro’s businesses. On June 4, over five hundred students and adults joined North Carolina A&T student body president Jesse Jackson in a silent march. The next evening, Jackson led close to seven hundred African Americans to City Hall and was charged with “inciting a riot.” Protests continued throughout town, leading Greensboro Mayor David Schenk to issue an appeal to all businesses to desegregate immediately and for activists to halt their protests.

By June 13, eight more Greensboro restaurants chose to desegregate, making approximately one-quarter of local establishments open to African Americans. In July, the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants Association insisted on a resolution calling for the immediate desegregation of all public spaces. And by the fall of 1963, close to 40 percent of Greensboro businesses had been integrated – including the institutions on Tate Street.

More information about the 1963 desegregation protests and marches – including more images and original documents – can be found at Civil Rights Greensboro.

JoAnne Smart Drane Remembers The Integration of Woman's College

JoAnne Smart and Bettye Tillman, 1956

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

This decision eventually led the state of North Carolina to begin the process of desegregating its three branches of the Consolidated University of North Carolina: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State College in Raleigh, and Woman’s College in Greensboro.  In 1956, Woman’s College (now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro) admitted the first two African American students – JoAnne Smart and Bettye Tillman. 

Smart recalls in her oral history interview, conducted in 2008 for The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Institutional Memory Collection, that she decided to apply to the previously all-white Woman’s College after she became aware of the Supreme Court decision.

She learned about being accepted to the college from an Associated Press reporter who called her in mid-August of 1956 to ask her how it felt being accepted to the Woman’s College.  Smart said the telephone call “boggled her mind” since she had not gotten an acceptance letter from the college.

When Smart arrived on campus on September 13, 1956, she learned that she had been assigned to Shaw Residence Hall where she met her new roommate, Bettye Tillman.  She and Tillman not only shared a room but an entire wing of the first floor of Shaw dorm.  The college made this special arrangement to prevent the two black students from sharing bathroom facilities with their white classmates – separation of bathroom facilities had been a major concern often mentioned in letters from white parents when news began to spread that two black students were being admitted to the college.  This arrangement left several rooms in that wing of Shaw dorm empty while other students were housed three or four per room across campus. The internal segregation lasted for a couple of years until several white students asked permission from the college administration to move into the empty rooms.

During the next few years, black students moved into other dorms on campus, but were always assigned rooms together and often in former dorm counselors rooms that had private bathrooms.

Smart also talked about being treated fairly by most faculty members and students.  Some students would ignore her but that was rare.  She was never in the same class as Tillman, they were always the only black student in a class during their entire four years, and they never had a black instructor at Woman’s College.

Regarding her social life on campus, Smart remembers that it was almost non-existent since movie theaters, restaurants, and other public places were still segregated in the late 1950s.  Smart said that she did socialize with the other black students on campus or with students from the historically black North Carolina A&T State College located in east Greensboro.

Smart and Tillman had their education classes on campus but were not allowed to do their student teaching at the Curry Practice School located on campus.  Smart recalls taking a taxi across town to do her student teaching at all-black Dudley High School. 

After graduating from Woman’s College in 1960, Smart went to North Carolina Central College and Duke University to complete her master’s in guidance counseling.  She eventually held several positions in the Raleigh City Schools and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

In 1992, the parlor of Shaw Residence Hall was named for JoAnne Smart and Bettye Tillman and in 2008; the Smart-Tillman Distinguished Professorship in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance was created in their honor.

The Woolworth Sit-Ins Remembered by Woman’s College Alumni

Woolworth

Prior to the 1960s, all public accommodations in the South were segregated including hotels, restaurants, restrooms, theaters, water fountains, and lunch counters.  African Americans could buy food at some lunch counters and take the food out, but they could not sit at the counters to eat.

On Monday, February 1, 1960, four North Carolina A&T State College students, initiated what would become a nationwide protest when they demanded the right to sit and be served at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. 

At least seven students -- Ann Dearsley, Laura Goldin, Claudette Graves, Myrna Lee, Marilyn Lott, Eugenia “Genie” Seaman, and Elizabeth “Betsy” Toth -- from the Woman’s College (now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro) joined the protest later in the week.  All the Woman’s College students except Graves and Lee were white. This caused quite an uproar not only on campus but also across the South when news of three white students participating in the protest was published in the newspapers.

Dearsley, Lott, and Seaman at Woolworth on Thursday, February 4, 1960
Greensboro Daily News, February 5, 1960

These seven alumni have been interviewed and their oral histories are now housed in Jackson Library’s Hodges Special Collections and University Archives on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  Following are some of their remembrances about the Woolworth Sit-ins.

Dearsley recalls having one of the white men who was milling around behind the lunch counter pull a knife and run it up and down her back.  She also remembers that she, Lott, and Seaman were surrounded by several A&T football players and escorted to a cab through the white mob outside Woolworth when they were ready to leave that afternoon to return to the campus. 

In her oral history interview, Toth recalls a person threatened to hit her upside her head with a two-by-four and wanting to go after that person.  She was told by Bennett College student protesters not to react but use the non-violent approach to the situation.

Seaman remembers that she found out about the Sit-ins through Marilyn Lott’s brother who was a student at nearby Greensboro College.  Seaman was from Florida and when the Orlando Sentinel published the story of her participation in the Sit-ins, her family received hate phone calls and her father’s business suffered.

When Lott was interviewed several years ago, she recalled being expelled from the college and later reinstated because of her participation in the Sit-ins.

Several other Woman’s College students also participated including Goldin who remembered the scene at Woolworth and feeling fear “because there were all those redneck guys in their bib overalls and screaming and yelling and calling obscenities.” 

Lee wanted to be a part of the protest; however, her father asked her not to become newsworthy so she decided to use her car to drive students to the Sit-ins – She said in her interview that she had worked out a schedule to attend her classes, pick up students from A&T College or Bennett College, drop off students near Woolworth, and then pick them up for a return trip to their school.

Graves said, “It was very significant that Woman’s College had students who would take the risk to come and be a part of that effort—of the Sit-ins.”

Each of the Woman’s College students who participated in the Woolworth Sit-ins felt that it was their “moral obligation” to join the protest in spite of possible reprisals from the hostile white crowd and were proud that they had participated in the protest.

For additional information about the civil rights movement and the Woolworth Sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, please see the Civil Rights Greensboro online collection created by the Digital Projects Office at the University Libraries