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In Greensboro, you can't walk very far in any direction without tripping over racial history. Even those who know the history are sometimes doomed to trip over it anyway.

That threatens to be the case with a protest expected this week outside Greensboro College, where administrators have been cut to the quick by resistance to a sportsplex planned in the nearby Warnersville neighborhood.

On its face, at least, the conflict is no Olympian hurdle. When GTCC moved out of the 30-acre J.C. Price campus near Freeman Mill Road and Lee Street, landlocked Greensboro College bought the site for $2 million, with plans for a track, athletic park, football field and grandstand.

Though it put the fate of the 1922 building in question, the plan was otherwise not a drastic change. The land less than a mile south of Greensboro College had been a school and playground for 80-plus years. Moreover, the middling, Division III athletic program was hardly in the same league as a Wake Forest or Carolina, and as it is, borrows Grimsley High's field for football games.

But then again, this is a long mile to go in Greensboro. J.C. Price wasn't just any school, and Warnersville wasn't just any neighborhood, but they sit smack at the hazardous intersection of history and race. Warnersville is Greensboro's first black community, and prior to integration, J.C. Price was a famously innovative black elementary and junior high from the 1920s through the 1960s.

And because the once-vibrant neighborhood and business district on Ashe Street was erased in one fell swoop by redevelopment in the 1960s, the old brick school is practically all that's left of a self-made community founded by freed slaves with the help of a Quaker, Yardley Warner.

Therefore, some J.C. Price alums and current Warnersville residents see this as a pattern repeating itself - a white institution dictating to black residents.

"To me, it's all about the powerful and the privileged taking advantage of a working class African American community," said Otis Hairston Jr., who lives across from J.C. Price. "Greensboro College would never purchase property in Irving Park or Starmount or College Hill."

Larkey Robinson Jr., a J.C. Price alumnus, agreed.

"You're putting a predominantly white school in the middle of a black neighborhood and expecting people not to be upset."

Clearly stung by the allegations of racism, which Greensboro College President Craven Williams called untrue and "very hurtful, very painful," campus officials scrambled to try to demonstrate good will.

The college, where the student body is 18 percent black, has invited the neighborhood to youth soccer camps and football clinics, concerts and lectures at the campus. In fall 2007, a history class was devoted to collecting Warnersville oral history, and in October the school will stage an all-black production of "Blues for an Alabama Sky," a play set in Harlem's heyday.

Hairston, who formed Warnersville Community Coalition and whose father was a community linchpin as pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, called the gestures "insulting."

"It's not genuine," agreed Blondine Wynn, a member of the last class to graduate from J.C. Price. "They're just trying to appease us."

Not everyone with ties to Warnersville agrees. James Griffin, a Mebane resident whose family goes back five generations in Warnersville, remembers the "boom" of the wrecking ball that obliterated a century of black history when he was a child in the 1960s.

As president of the Warnersville Historical and Beautification Society, which formed before the community's bicentennial parade this spring, Griffin said he wants what is best for the community.

"I believe in working through people and with people," said Griffin, who coaches ball at Warnersville Community Center, where he played as a child. "There are so many positives that could come out of a situation like this."

Williams, the Greensboro College president, said the mention of a "stadium" at initial meetings may have been misleading, because the college didn't need a facility that big.

Williams also believes neighbors became alarmed at inaccurate rumors that the college would take homes as part of the plan. A private institution has no such power, Williams observed, and the 30 acres was altogether large enough.

Yet members of a coalition planning to protest at the college Tuesday said they became distrustful when Warnersville was not consulted or informed in advance.

Having watched the redevelopment of downtown turn to the south, with projects such as the upscale SouthSide townhomes on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive as well as the future greenway, Warnersville residents fear being uprooted again.

"The same strategy is being used now," said Warnersville resident Jean Williams, "to get us out of here to do what they want to do."

Given the history, the Greensboro College president conceded those fears to be "very logical and rational." But particularly after seeing the results of the oral history project last fall, he said the school was committed to honoring Warnersville.

"We have great respect for what Warnersville means in the historical sense, and what it means to the people living there today," Williams said. "And we want to pay tribute to J.C. Price in a way that benefits individuals today."

Following a failed attempt by the neighborhood coalition to have the property rezoned, the college posted "Coming Soon" signs and has been holding soccer, lacrosse and football practices on the fields outside the vacant J.C. Price building, which was last used by GTCC in 2005.

Williams said the school is studying how part of the historic building could be incorporated into a field house plan, with a portion dedicated to Warnersville history. Griffin, the neighborhood preservationist, said he is interested in broadening campus ties to youth programs, and potential college scholarships.

Either way, it appears that there will be a protest Tuesday. Part of it stems from old wounds - watching a lively neighborhood that had its own movie theater, fish market, cab stand and pool parlor, such colorful old standbys as Macie Sussman's, Joe Lala's, the Big Glass Restaurant, razed by a stroke of a faceless bureaucrat's pen.

And part of it is the determination not to let J.C. Price, the only remnant of where all those people came from, be erased.

"I think we just need to be heard," said Larkey Robinson Jr. "It's not for someone else to come in and tell us what we can do with our neighborhood."

At Greensboro College, Craven Williams said he is listening. "We want Warnersville to benefit from our being there," Williams said. "Every year, every month that we are together, it will improve."

And maybe it's true. Maybe Greensboro will really go the long, last mile. It takes so long, it's hard to tell.

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