No One Voice Speaks for Black Greensboro

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One Voice Speaks
For Black Greensboro
Greensboro Daily News, Wed., Nov. 26, 19801
BY SCOTT SHANE
Daily News Staff Writer
Drive east on Market Street from downtown
Greensboro and within a few minutes you will pass
many of the power centers of Greensboro's black
community.
American Federal Savings and Loan and Greensboro National Bank, twin pillars of the city's black
businesses, face each other beyond the railway underpass. The former Cosmos I restaurant, recently closed
and reopened as Trevi Fountain and likely to maintain
its status as the daily gathering place of several of the
city's most influential blacks; Perry Brown's funeral
home; Hayes-Taylor YMCA, for decades a vital institution for Greensboro's black middle class; the law offices
of Kenneth Lee, chief builder of the city's black business community — all are located within the first half-
mile.
To the north is the campus of N.C. A&T State
University; a short distance to the south that of Bennett College. Faculty members and graduates of these
two predominantly black institutions dominate black
Greensboro's academic and professional life.
On both sides of Market Street are businesses
owned and run by blacks. Most prominent is the small-
business kingdom of brothers Alexander and Will Parker, including fast-food restaurants, a real estate firm,,
a formal wear shop, a funeral home, a barber shop and
more.
"Once you cross over on Market Street into southeast Greensboro, you're in another world," says James
Howerton, 33, a community representative in the city
manager's office and one of a handful of blacks near the
top in city government. "The people are different. The
lingo is different. There are two worlds here, a white
world and a black world. That's a reality."
It is also a reality that the styles and reputations
of Greensboro's black leaders are defined largely by
their relations to the city's two worlds.
The power remains — save at election time — almost exclusively in the white world; the black leaders'
primary constituency is in the black world. It is the
delicate task of Greensboro's black leadership to obtain
a share of the power without losing the support and
respect of their constituency.
The conviction that power in Greensboro is still
primarily located in the large corporations is shared by
nearly every one of the approximately 25 influential
blacks interviewed by the Daily News.
Part Four Of Five
"This is a capitalist country and a capitalist city,
and we live by the economic golden rule: he who has
the gold makes the rules," says the Rev. Prince
Graves, pastor of St. James Baptist Church for 28 of
his 58 years.
"Greensboro is a mill town — never forget that,"
says Lewis Brandon, operator of the Uhuru book store
on East Market, which functions as a community center of sorts. "The people who run the mills — Burlington, Cone Mills and the other corporations — run the
town."
Bennett College President Isaac Miller agrees
"The people who head up Jefferson-Pilot, Burlington,
Cone Mills, Southern Life — they in my way of thinking represent the power structure in Greensboro.
Their attitudes and objectives tend to be reflected by
(mayor) Jim Melvin, (councilman) Vic Nussbaum and
the others (in city government)."
But the consensus is that corporate power is not
exercised daily or publicly.
"The business community gets to the council before the information about an upcoming decision is
made public," says Hermon Fox, an engineer who
teaches part-time at A&T and has served for several
years as president of the Greensboro Citizens Association. "They go to church with them; they play golf with
them. They're smart enough not to go down to the
council and say, 'Do this.' When they make a decision it
often doesn't come before the council."
Blacks — with few exceptions — do not ordinarily
go to church with or play golf with the city's corporate
leaders. Neither do they work with them, since there
are few blacks in middle management and
none in top management in the large local
corporations.
There have been blacks on the board of
the Chamber of Commerce for more than a
decade — current black members are Richard
Bowling and Bennett College administrator
W.J. Trent. But with a single exception —
A&T Chancellor Lewis Dowdy, who was
elected in 1973 — all the blacks on the chamber board have been appointed by the president rather than elected by the membership.
Many persons interviewed cited this as
evidence of an insensitivity to black concerns
on the part of the white business community.
"The fact that there's one (black) or maybe
two on the board does not represent the will
of the Chamber of Commerce," said attorney
and businessman Kenneth Lee, who dropped
out of the chamber as a result of its apparent
insensitivity.
"It's like being an emeritus member," he
said. "You talk and they listen, but you know
how you got there and they know how you got
there."
Essentially excluded from the corporate
world, blacks have reached positions of leadership by other means and in other areas. If
there has been a shift in the nature of the
city's black leadership in recent years, it has
been toward diversity.
"People are beginning to be more and
more independent," says A&T business professor and tireless civic activist Katie Dorsett.
"They're not looking to one leader. Blacks will
probably never again have one leader —
though some people would like to see black
folks that way."
Hermon Fox traces the increasing diversity of black leadership to the growing complexity of black concerns. "When there was a
water fountain that said 'whites' and a water
fountain that said 'blacks' it was easy to say
where the problem was," said Fox. "But now
our problems are more sophisticated and
harder to define, and we need more sophisticated solutions."