Changing Greensboro

In 1960, students from predominantly black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down at a Greensboro lunch counter. Peaceful but determined, the Negroes vowed not to move until they were served -- and thereby set the pattern of nonviolent sit-ins that dominated black protest for years. Last week A. & T. students in the tobacco and textile town traded shots with police and National Guards men for three days. The contrast capsuled the revolution in the mode of protest in the U.S. that has taken place in the '60s.

The trouble started when students in the town's all-Negro Dudley High School went on a rock-throwing spree to protest a school election from which a militant candidate had been barred.

A. & T. students took up the high schoolers' cause only to find themselves excluded from the school by a court order. They vented their anger by pelting whites who drove their cars past the university campus. Police, sent to the campus to enforce a curfew, were then fired upon by snipers, and the dangerous situation grew even worse when Freshman Willie E. Grimes, 20, was found on the campus shot to death.

Though an autopsy showed that the fatal bullet was fired from a weapon smaller than the .38-caliber service revolvers carried by police, students charged brutality, and some, firing from behind logs, wounded five officers in a military-style ambush near the campus. University authorities sought to halt the violence by ordering the closing of the school by 6 p.m. Friday, and police and Guardsmen stood by on the perimeter of the campus to enforce the order. Early that morning, summoned by a report that the student-union building was being looted, police moved in and arrested several before sniper fire from other campus buildings pinned them down. Then the Guard acted. Supported by tear gas delivered by helicopter and smoke spread by a light plane, 500 Guardsmen swept across the campus in a dawn assault, clearing the dormitories and rounding up more than 200 students. Neither the police nor the Guardsmen, one of whom was wounded in the action, made any further arrests. They did confiscate a number of weapons found in the dormitories. Among these tools of the new type of protest: semiautomatic rifles.

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