A Place Where Success Was Expected: Second Edition

How could a place seeded in slavery and drenched in the cruelest forms of racism survive to become the community’s educational, social, and political heart? What combination of circumstances and human will enable people to overcome every manner of roadblocks placed in their way? How could one place produce such a broad range of outstanding community, state, national, and international leaders in nearly every imaginable field of endeavor? These are a few of the questions answered in the book about James B. Dudley High School then and now. This 2021 edition of A Place Where Success Was Expected includes a more extensive study of the school’s founding on Bennett College’s campus in 1879, including the years before the existing campus was built. The book also includes more than 40 additional excerpts about Dudley alumni and topics related to African American high school students’ education in Greensboro and Guilford County. It is a comprehensive history of African Americans’ education in Greensboro, North Carolina, and parts of Guilford County as told through the insights and experiences of some of the people who lived and worked for over five generations in the South. The story is told as only those who lived through slavery, through Jim Crow, through integration, and back again could tell it. A Place Where Success Was Expected uses a unique form of historical content that blends first-person narration with analytical writing that presents the reader with rare insight into African American life in the South from the 16th Century through the early 21st Century.