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GREENSBORO -- Race. It's often cited as an issue today, and it's been one here since the first white settlers arrived — some with slaves — to create the town in 1808.

A few decades later, Greensboro had 101 slaves and 26 freed black people, compared with 369 white people.

The slaves tended to live in primitive quarters such as those that remained standing well into the 20th century at North Elm and Bellemeade streets behind the home of one of the city's first families, the Lindsays.

Black and white relations were said to be cordial, if not paternal, but it can be assumed that some white slave owners kept an ear cocked for rumblings of any black people who might defy the status quo.

In the earliest years, volunteer patrol squads walked the city after nightfall. The town's commissioners, as they were originally called, allowed patrols to administer up to 15 lashes to a slave caught outside after dark.

Yet, despite the repressive atmosphere, voices from both races arose in protest against slavery from time to time. Quakers in Guilford County had been calling for slavery's abolition since the late 1700s.

Eventually, baby step by baby step, change occurred over two centuries.

Now celebrating its 200th year, Greensboro has an African American mayor, Yvonne Johnson, and police chief, Tim Bellamy. It has African American county commissioners, City Council members, principals, teachers and coaches.

In 1969, the city and county elected North Carolina's first African American legislator, Greensboro lawyer Henry Frye, who later became chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

Many changes came in the 1950s and 1960s. That's when a man called the city's "Black Moses," the late dentist George Simkins, led fights to integrate public golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools, libraries and hospitals.

Simkins and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pressured the local school board to risk public fury and obey the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools. The board took three years — quick compared to other Southern cities — to enroll five African American children at previously all-white Gillespie Park School and black high school student Josephine Boyd Bradley at what's now Grimsley.

Those actions were followed by the 1960 sit-ins. Four N.C. A&T students — David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and Ezell Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan) — demanded to be served at the segregated downtown Woolworth's store lunch counter. Their action started a Southern movement.

A&T student leader Jesse Jackson led downtown marches against segregated theaters and cafeterias in 1963. Mass arrests resulted when students blocked intersections, but their goals were achieved without violence.

Bloodshed couldn't be stopped, however, when rioting erupted on the city's east side in 1968, after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and in 1969, after a disputed student body election at all-black Dudley High School.

Results of the rioting were National Guard patrols, nightly curfews and gunfire. Killed, apparently in the crossfire, was A&T student Willie Grimes.

In 1979 a Klan-Nazi confrontation with the Communist Workers Party left five Communist Workers Party members dead in east Greensboro.

The civil rights successes of the 1950s and 1960s might leave the impression that silence prevailed before that time.

Far from it. As early as the 1930s, Bennett College students protested how black people were portrayed in movies. Black candidates started seeking council seats in the 1930s. A&T students jeered Gov. Luther Hodges when he spoke on campus in 1955 and kept pronouncing Negro as "Negra."

In the early 1820s, many Quakers in the New Garden community (now Guilford College) could no longer tolerate life in a slave state. They moved to Indiana, taking names such as Greensboro and New Garden and assigning them to newly founded towns.

Most Guilford residents accepted slavery, but only a few owned slaves. The issue wasn't ignored. The Quakers who left for Indiana kept the issue burning by joining brethren who stayed behind. They began the Underground Railroad, a series of trails, safe houses and hideaways for black people fleeing north. New Garden was one starting point, with a terminus at the Indiana home of Quaker Levi Coffin, a former New Garden resident.

Hal Sieber, who has chronicled local black history, wrote of a slave named Saul, who eavesdropped to learn about slaves desiring to leave. Until the time was right to flee, Saul and railroad leaders reportedly hid the slaves in caves in the woods on what's now the Guilford College campus.

By the Civil War, Guilford had 3,625 slaves, 693 freed black people and 15,738 white people. While many supported slavery here, they didn't see it as nation-busting issue. Guilford residents voted 2,771 to 113 against secession in 1861. But when war came, the county and state fought and suffered. Some 40,000 Tar Heels died, more than any Southern state.

The post-war Reconstruction Period brought the Ku Klux Klan and terrorism against freed black people and the white people who befriended them, such as carpetbagger Albion Tourgee, a lawyer-writer who spent 10 years here urging equal rights for black people.

Federal troops occupying the South tried to guarantee fair treatment and the vote to freedmen. That led to black officeholders, including congressmen, particularly Down East, where black voters often were in the majority. Black voters lacked numbers here to win office. But they could vote. Moreover, they could become carpenters, masons and firemen on locomotives, and enter other skilled occupations, with pay equal to white counterparts.

Progress ended in 1900. With federal troops gone from the South, North Carolina's political leaders swept the state in a white-supremacy campaign. Overnight, blacks lost the vote and their jobs. They were pretty much limited to laborers, janitors and domestics.

The loss of the African American vote stymied municipal progress here. The city had long used bonds to pay for city improvements. Black voters prior to 1900 supported bond issues. White voters were divided. After African Americans lost the vote, bond referendums often failed.

Segregation turned Greensboro into two cities: one white, one black. In 1914, William Windsor, superintendent of black schools (and namesake for Windsor Community Center) bought a house west of the Gorrell and Martin streets intersection. City leaders forced him to move, citing an ordinance that essentially allowed whites to live west of the intersection. Blacks had to stay to the east.

A few low-profile interracial social and athletic events took place in the Jim Crow era, but segregation ruled. Black Dudley and white Greensboro Senior High weren't even allowed to compete in sports.

A proposal in the 1920s to hire black police officers to patrol black areas was rejected. Black police officers didn't appear until the 1940s. No black firefighters were hired until the early 1960s.

Whites-only signs appeared at restaurants, above water fountains and on bathroom doors. Black people sat in a separate balcony at the Carolina Theatre.

Integration moved some prosperous blacks into previously all-white neighborhoods.

The black college Immanuel Lutheran on East Market closed in 1960, partly because integration had sent students elsewhere.

Of course, integration's pluses overwhelmed the few negatives. Since the 1970s, hardly a political post or important civic position has existed here that a black person hasn't held.

Yes, racial tensions remain, and some complain about churches remaining segregated, though more than a few aren't. Recent problems in the police department had racial overtones.

Black and white cliques prevail in schools, but anyone who pays any attention sees white and black friends in schools and workplaces.

As syndicated columnist Clarence Page wrote in January, after black presidential candidate Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses: "We haven't grown out of a racially turbulent past, but we're growing out of it. That's worth celebrating. Cautiously."