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That day, Monday, Feb. 1, 1960, there were no golfers at whites-only Gillespie Park Golf Course.

It wasn’t because the city’s attention was riveted on the Woolworth store on South Elm Street, where four black N.C. A&T students were refused service at the segregated lunch counter.

Most white and black Greensboro residents had no idea what was happening at the dime store. The news wouldn’t break until 24 hours later when the afternoon Greensboro Record hit the streets. The morning Daily News was scooped and didn’t have the story until Wednesday morning.

Gillespie golf course was empty because the city had closed the course rather than integrate it. Six black men were arrested for trespassing in 1955 when they showed up with golf clubs. The course stayed closed while the black golfers’ case wound its way through the courts.

This was the situation during the pre-sit-in days in Greensboro, a city that long bragged about progressive race relations and the presence of three black colleges. (One, Immanuel Lutheran, would soon close.)

White leaders in 1960 boasted of integration that had taken place to date while seemingly justifying what remained.

Greensboro was indeed ahead of most Southern cities in integration and trying to be fair with the “separate but equal” segregationist policies that remained in place.

It hadn’t always been that way.

Once white supremacy candidates won offices statewide in 1900, Greensboro — like other cities — became rigorously segregated for the next half century.

Black residents, who had lived among whites downtown since the city’s founding in 1808, became essentially confined to the southeast section of the city or in tight black enclaves surrounded by white residential areas.

City leaders used denial and contradictory thinking to justify segregation. In 1914, the city’s ruling elders booted the superintendent of black schools from his house on Gorrell Street. The house stood just over the border separating black Gorrell from white Gorrell.

Town leaders declared the action fair because a white person would have been barred from living in a black section.

White leaders argued that black people didn’t need to use white hospitals — although Catholic St. Leo’s maintained a black ward. The wealthy white Richardson family had built L. Richardson Memorial Hospital on Benbow Road for black people.

Why would black people want to golf at Gillespie when the city had provided for them Nocho Park Golf Course? Never mind that Nocho had nine poorly maintained holes while Gillespie had 18.

Why would black people want to swim at Lindley Park Pool when the city had built for black people what is now called Windsor Community Center, which had a pool?

By the time of the sit-ins, some racial barriers had fallen or been bent. In 1957, three years after the national Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school discrimination, Greensboro, Charlotte and Winston-Salem became the first to integrate their public schools, at least in name.

Five black students entered Gillespie Park School on Asheboro Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, and one enrolled at Greensboro Senior High School, now Grimsley, on Westover Terrace.

Even though the student numbers were small, the words and actions of school leaders were bold and inspiring.

Six of the seven school board members voted for integration.

“I should rather fail in supporting a right cause than win in supporting a wrong one,” School Superintendent Ben L. Smith said in opposition to a plan by state leaders to close all public schools rather than integrate them.

During the sit-ins, the world press focused on Greensboro. Mayor George Roach, a real estate agency owner, defended the city.

He boasted that Greensboro had abolished segregation that forced black passengers to the back of public buses. It had integrated parks, libraries, the airport terminal, some schools and the new War Memorial Auditorium, where Louis Armstrong was to perform later in February.

What Roach didn’t say was this progress in desegregation resulted from suits or threats of suits, led by dentist George Simkins.

Roach also was proud that Greensboro was the first city in the state to elect a black person to the City Council in 1951. He didn’t say that Dr. William Hampton likely won because of single-shot voting by black voters. Instead of casting ballots for seven of 14 candidates seeking seven council seats, black people voted only for Hampton, thus denying votes to white candidates.

By 1960, most of the ugly signs — signs in the literal sense — had come down. These announced at the entrance “Whites Only” or “We Reserve to the Right to Refuse Service.”

A newspaper photo in the late 1950s showed a sign being removed that ordered black people to the back of the bus. These actions resulted from a rare interracial committee that had been at work for years in Greensboro and which met at the YWCA, about the only place in the white community where integrated meetings were allowed.

The committee convinced business owners the signs were demeaning and made the city look racially backward.

Still, some Jim Crow relics remained, including side-by-side water fountains — one painted white, one green — at the south entrance to City Hall.

Black people continued to sit in separate balconies in downtown theaters. Some apparel stores refused to allow them to try on clothes before buying them.

Even though a black student had enrolled at Greensboro Senior High (now Grimsley High), the idea of that school playing Dudley, the all-black high school, was forbidden. A gym was built at Dudley only after black people won the right for Dudley to play home games at Greensboro Senior High’s new gym. Dudley’s old gym didn’t even have a regulation-length floor.

White people who feared the U.S. Constitution wasn’t on their side about segregation used subterfuge to maintain the status quo.

The now-defunct Green Valley golf course was privately owned but open to the white public.

Fearful that “public” might be interpreted by the courts to include black people, Green Valley overnight became a private country club. Private dues-charging clubs could legally deny entry to a person for any reason.

The sit-ins then were just the latest challenge to the status quo that had accelerated after black military men returned to Greensboro after World War II and found they had more personal freedom overseas than here.

Even before World War II, Bennett College students protested at a downtown theater the way Hollywood portrayed blacks in the movies.

In 1954, a Bennett College professor who loved classical music picketed outside Aycock Auditorium on the campus of the then-segregated Woman’s College (now UNCG) after being told he had to sit in an upper balcony designated for black people during a performance by a Philadelphia classical orchestra.

Despite the success of the sit-ins — it took six months before Woolworth and Kress finally integrated — most of the rest of downtown remained segregated.

The sit-ins, however, inspired demonstrations three years later led by A&T student leader Jesse Jackson, who marched hundreds of black (and white) students through downtown, blocking intersections and getting arrested.

Their goal was to desegregate all of downtown, and the effort proved successful.

Another major case during this period was led by Dr. George Simkins and other black medical professionals, a suit against Moses Cone and Wesley Long hospitals, which denied black doctors and dentists the right to see patients there.

The case gained national attention, and the Supreme Court ruled as a result that all hospitals receiving federal funds had to be totally integrated.

During the time of Jim Crow, it was little known that two downtown eateries — a drug store at Elm and Market owned by the liberal Lane brothers, and Bob Jones Sandwich Shop on East Washington Street downtown — served both races.

In 1956, the John R. Taylor family opened two Holiday Inns here to both races. In 1954, the Catholic high school, Notre Dame on Summit Avenue, enrolled 19 black students. Several black students entered UNCG in 1958. Not a peep of protest was heard.

But the four A&T students challenging a national chain store, Woolworth — which allowed integration at stores outside the South — grabbed the attention of the world.

They were ordinary, hard-studying young men who wanted a piece of the American dream. One, Franklin McCain, was wearing his Air Force ROTC uniform that day. Another, Joseph McNeil, would years later become a two-star general in the Air Force Reserves.

As for the closing of Gillespie Park Golf Course, the effects remain visible.

During the seven years Gillespie was closed, the city took a chunk of the course to build a maintenance center. Interstate 85 and 40 took a few holes.

When the course reopened in 1962 — to white and black golfers — only nine holes remained.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net