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Walking up February One Place on Monday morning was a forlorn feeling. More so than usual.

It wasn't because of the sight of the unfinished Woolworth's sit-in museum, once our town's claim to fame, now a symbol so polarizing that the City Council felt compelled to pass a law that it can't get city tax money.

Nor was it the first chill of September casting a pall, or even the sheer predictability of the day ahead — the feeling that a story written before was about to be written again, like the weatherman's recurring assignment in the movie "Groundhog Day."

No, this feeling was straight off the front page: Claudette Burroughs-White, the veteran city councilwoman, was dead of cancer at 67. It felt empty because this was her town, and this narrow street had been good enough reason to stick around.

It was still called Sycamore Street in 1960, when Burroughs-White was a junior at Woman's College, which later became UNCG. The school was all female, all white — except for the future councilwoman and two black roommates housed in an empty dorm, as if quarantined.

At times, they were treated like a disease, even by professors. "Have you ever taught one of these?" Burroughs-White once recalled her professor asking a colleague, in the student's presence.

But as much as she stood out on campus, she blended in uptown. Hearing the news of the sit-down protest at the Woolworth's lunch counter, Burroughs-White was there for the second day, and every day thereafter.

The three white Woman's College art students who joined the protest nearly got expelled, but not Burroughs-White. Campus officials just asked that she not wear the charcoal-gray class jacket with the white "WC" emblem on the pocket to the protests.

But the fact that white students from her school joined in was cause for hope. This might have been a staging point for one of the most grand-scale social movements of our time, but even wholesale change begins on the retail level. Making the sale to one customer at a time.

They are the ordinary struggles that don't make history books; more likely, thankless town meetings that run past midnight and are lucky to make page B1. Such was the biggest battle of Burroughs-White's 10-year tenure on the council: closing White Street Landfill, the bane of her ward.

Always strategizing, always regrouping, Burroughs-White finally turned the tide when the council met with the Nealtown homeowners on their own turf — next to the dump.

Why on earth did they move here in the first place, asked a conservative white northwest council member. His expression changed upon hearing a Nealtown resident's answer: "When I moved here, this was a segregated city. I didn't have a lot of choice."

Textbook Burroughs-White: Never talk, unless there's silence. As there was when the previous city manager retired, and Mayor Keith Holliday awkwardly flubbed his lines, saying the official had "touched all of us."

"I feel insulted," Burroughs-White quipped. "He never touched ME."

And when she herself chose to step down in 2005 and civic leader Goldie Wells won the seat, Wells embraced her predecessor and happily declared, "Today is my birthday!"

"Yeah," the departing councilwoman observed dryly, "and I'm the one getting the gift."

But those hours — from the lunch counter to the night meetings, were a gift, her way to keep a promise made years ago on West Sycamore.

"I really think this is a chosen place," she once said of Greensboro, "and this is holy ground."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com