Lawmakers Direct Funds for Teaching Civil Rights History to Conservative Group

Tucked inside the General Assembly’s last full budget, in 2023, was a little-noticed provision granting $350,000 “to develop and implement a program to teach public school students about NC’s Civil Rights history.”

The funds weren’t directed to the state Department of Public Instruction. A different bill, which had bipartisan support but died in the House Appropriations Committee, would have required units on the Civil Rights Movement to be taught in middle school and high school civics classes and directed $250,000 to DPI to put that in place.

The funds also didn’t go to two longstanding nonprofits that might seem like obvious candidates—the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, housed in the Greensboro building where the sit-in movement began, and the SNCC Legacy Project, which archives the history of the pivotal civil rights organization founded in Raleigh.

Instead, the Republican-controlled legislature earmarked the funds for the Clarence Henderson Education Foundation, which was only a few months old at the time. Perhaps weighing in its favor, it is named for a prominent Black Republican who was then a voting member of the NCGOP Central Committee. 

Henderson, one of about 30 participants in the second day of the 1960 sit-ins at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, argues in frequent appearances at Republican events that the Civil Rights Movement has been “hijacked.” 

Democrats use critical race theory “as a way to exploit our educational systems to teach the black community to judge the white community by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character,” he wrote in his memoir, Forgotten Courage, published in 2023 by the N.C. Faith and Freedom Coalition. “They are promoting the sin of racism we fought so hard to overcome, and brazenly claiming the moral high ground while doing so.”

The state grant to Henderson’s namesake foundation came with no reporting requirements, and the organization has not publicly disclosed how it used the money. Its tax return for 2024, the year it received the state grant, is not yet available through the IRS, it has no website, and neither Henderson nor the organization’s registered agent, the Rev. Paul Brintley, responded to multiple interview requests. 

The foundation’s most visible product is a short documentary about Henderson. The N.C. Faith and Freedom Coalition, which calls Henderson and Brintley “ambassadors,” promoted a screening in January.

Henderson wrote in his 2023 memoir that he was looking for people to help fund a “unifying movie” about his life, specifically “investors who are concerned about the true story of America to be told and not rewritten.” The coalition’s executive director, Jason Williams, declined an interview with The Assembly, saying “I believe your publication lacks objectivity.” 

The Clarence Henderson Education Foundation also screened a 10-minute video in Burke County public schools this year. The video differs from the typical telling of the Greensboro sit-ins in that it mostly leaves out the first day: February 1, 1960. 

“This is the story of one man whose experiences under Jim Crow law taught him the power of love and compassion in overcoming adversity,” the narrator intones.

“On February 2, 1960, four college students—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Billy Smith, and Clarence Henderson—took a bold step against segregation, sparking a movement that would forever change American history.” 

Viewers could easily conclude that Henderson was one of the original planners—since dubbed the Greensboro Four—or that he played a significant role in the organizing that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But neither is true.

An Iconic Photo

The actual Greensboro Four are Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair Jr., who later changed his name to Jibreel Khazan.

They walked into the Woolworth at about 4:30 p.m. on February 1, 1960, bought some toiletries, then sat down at the lunch counter that did not serve Black people. When they were denied service, the men refused to get up, leaving only when the store closed for the day. 

Henderson learned about their historic act when the four, all students at North Carolina A&T State University, returned to campus to recruit others to join them. Henderson knew Khazan from childhood and accepted his invitation, he wrote in his memoir: “I did it because it needed to be done.”

They walked to the Woolworth, and Henderson sat with some others at the counter. Sometime afterward, Jack Moebus, a photographer at Greensboro’s afternoon paper, snapped the photo that came to be synonymous with the city’s sit-ins: four Black men sitting in a row, with three of them, including Henderson, looking over their left shoulders toward the camera. 

The first image of the sit-ins to be published was defining. While Moebus had captured an image of the Greensboro Four leaving the Woolworth on the first day, that image wasn’t made public until a decade later. The four men in the counter photo have been repeatedly misidentified in news coverage over the years as the Greensboro Four. 

There is little indication that Henderson was a leader in the movement that spread rapidly across North Carolina and the country in 1960 and 1961. By the third day of the sit-ins, there were 60 participants, including white students and female students from Bennett College, another HBCU. So many protesters came that some waited outside while others chose new protest sites, starting with the Kress Department Store just down the street. Within 10 days, there were sit-ins in eight North Carolina cities. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

Despite his elevation to the NCGOP pointman for all things civil rights, Henderson makes no appearance in Civilities and Civil Rights, a history of the Greensboro sit-in and the movement that followed written by William Chafe, a now-retired Duke University history professor and co-director of its Oral History Program and Center for the Study of Civil Rights. Henderson’s name is not listed among the attendees of the Shaw University conference that spring where SNCC was founded.

Henderson’s memoir describes no other specific actions he took to further the sit-in movement. Instead, he summarized in sweeping, vague terms: “We put Jim Crow on trial, and Jim Crow was found guilty.”

McNeil, McCain, Richmond, and Khazan continued to be active in the movement, said Irving Joyner, a law professor at North Carolina Central University who has played a role in much of the civil rights litigation in the state over the past half century.

“Although they went separate ways, they always promoted the notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion wherever they were, whether it was in the military, whether it was in business, or whatever it was in,” Joyner said. “They promoted the ideas articulated under the notion of equal protection of the law, and trying to deal with issues surrounding segregation and discrimination and bias.”

Joyner met the Greensboro Four over the years “because they were around.” Henderson wasn’t, he said. “I’ve not known of him to have any involvement in any of those types of activities.”

That makes Joyner wonder about the General Assembly’s motivations in tapping Henderson to design programs that tell the movement’s history. “There are literally thousands of people” with the same level of involvement as Henderson, he said. “One day does not make you a civil rights warrior.”

Joyner also noted that around the same time that Republican leaders put the grant for Henderson’s organization in the budget, they were also pushing to remove a broad swath of materials and initiatives they labeled “DEI” from public schools—including, in some cases, books about the Civil Rights Movement.

While it is legitimate for anyone, including Henderson, to share their personal story, Joyner said, he sees the grant as “a kind of a counter activity that’s underway and trying to create an alternate version of civil rights.” 

The Modern Day Lunch Counter

In his memoir, Henderson encourages readers to join him at the “modern day lunch counter” in the fight against cancel culture.

“Lives are being destroyed simply because of someone’s perception,” he writes, based on “their created concept of racism, privilege, or any other emotion that has caused them to lose their common sense.”

In his view, “The LBGTQ have hijacked the civil rights movement and advanced it one step further.” 

Henderson’s prescription: “We must tear down the left leaning wall of Socialism, Communism, Marxism and any kind of ism except Capitalism. We must do our part to win our local elections, no matter what the odds.”

He recounts going to a GOP meeting in Greensboro in 2013 and telling the assembled politicos: “You need me.” 

“I made that claim because Democrats are great at setting the narrative—more often than not a false narrative,” he writes. “I saw that there was a lack of engagement with the Black community because they had given up on ever winning the Black vote. So, I started sharing with a number of conservative groups,” trying to bring more Black Christian conservatives into the party.

His profile rose quickly. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory appointed him to chair the state’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commission. Conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck hailed Henderson as a “civil rights icon” in 2015 after he joined Beck’s All Lives Matter march in Birmingham, Alabama. 

At its peak in 2020, Henderson denounced the Black Lives Matter movement on Fox News Radio, saying the group means to “tear down the fabric of America,” and gave a speech endorsing Trump at the Republican National Convention. The next year, he was honored by the state GOP’s Hall of Fame as an “example of Living History” and embodiment of “the determination and values WE as Americans and Republicans champion!”; the website for the event misidentifies him as one of the Greensboro Four.

A veteran of the multi-level marketing giant Primerica, where he says he was a regional vice president and “the audit and compliance officer for other regional vice presidents’ offices,” Henderson directed the interest from politicians into business opportunities. 

Campaign finance records show that the Cabarrus County Republican Party paid him a $500 honorarium in 2014 and other paid speaking engagements followed. He was paid 12 speaker’s fees between 2017 and 2024 for a total of $6,117, according to campaign records. Political committees paid another $1,052 to Henderson, the records show, but they do not specify the reason. Additional money went from political committees to Henderson’s company C.E. Henderson LLC, which received $26,500 for social media consulting and phone banking between 2020 and 2022, according to state records.

From 2017 to 2025, Henderson also led the North Carolina chapter of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group of Black conservatives with a seat on the NCGOP’s Central Committee. Campaign finance records show that the committee of at least one Republican political candidate, state Sen. Ted Alexander, donated to the organization, which describes its mission as bringing “the sanctity of free market and limited government ideas to bear on the hardest problems facing our nation.” But like Henderson’s more recent endeavor, it discloses very little information about its finances. Henderson is also listed on the associated national group’s website as the “national spokesman.”

“The Bible says, ‘A laborer is worthy of hire,’” he wrote in his memoir. After speaking to political groups for free, “I have made a business out of it and have done well. When one door closed, God opened another door.”

To Bridge the Gap

Henderson, now 84, tells his life story as if it were ordained from birth. He was named for the white cotton farmer who employed his father, who was then a sharecropper in Townville, South Carolina.

“Being named after him helped set the tone for me to bridge the gap between the races,” Henderson wrote in his memoir. In a podcast interview, he called it “divine intervention.”

A line Henderson repeats frequently, including in his April testimony before the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission, an advisory panel on how to safeguard religious liberty, is that “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

His education foundation, however, seems to be working in a silo.

State Rep. Allen Buansi, a Democrat and civil rights attorney who was a sponsor of the unsuccessful 2023 bill to require civil rights instruction in public schools, learned about Henderson’s foundation and the state appropriation only after The Assembly asked him about it. So did fellow Democratic cosponsors Amos Quick and Lindsay Prather.

Joyner, who closely followed the failed bill’s progress, was likewise surprised to hear about the state grant to Henderson’s foundation. So was John Swaine, CEO of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which has previously received state funding.

The current state social studies standards, passed in 2021 amid heated controversy related to “critical race theory,” do not specify what historical events teachers must cover. But the General Assembly has in the recent past ordered DPI to develop curricula on particular subjects. 

In 2021, lawmakers directed it to integrate education on the Holocaust and genocide, and to develop the curriculum for a Holocaust Studies elective to be offered in middle schools and high schools.

Teaching on civil rights history tends to be episodic and heavily dependent on the teacher’s interest, Joyner said. “There’s not a concentrated effort going on in the school system to deal with that subject, and so in most schools, it’s just avoided.”

A spokesperson for longtime Senate leader Phil Berger did not make him available for an interview about the allocation to Henderson’s organization, but noted that the budget provision originated in the House. The Assembly asked to speak with House Speaker Destin Hall, the House Appropriation Committee senior chairs, as well as key Republicans on the K-12 Education Committee. All declined or ignored the request.

The Assembly asked eight school districts, including the state’s four largest, and two charter school organizations whether they had used any materials or programs provided by the Clarence Henderson Education Foundation. Only one—Burke County—said it had, after Brintley called the chair of the school board and offered Henderson as a speaker, according to Superintendent Mike Swan.

Henderson and Brintley screened the 10-minute movie for the district’s eighth graders and answered their questions, said Swan.

One student asked whether Henderson’s friends and family disapproved of the sit-ins, a video provided by the district shows. “There were a lot of adults who said it wasn’t time,” he replied, sitting on a stage at East Burke Middle School with the famous lunch counter photograph projected on a big screen behind him. “We did not let that deter us.”

Henderson told students he was not nervous sitting at the lunch counter. “I grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in all of Greensboro, so I understood that certain challenges you have to take on.”

School administrators said Henderson talked about how he grew up and life under Jim Crow laws, but there was no mention of his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement after that day at Woolworth’s lunch counter.

Roughly 70% of the students at Burke County’s Walter Johnson Middle School are Latino; one drew a parallel between opposition to the federal deportation push and Henderson’s protest of segregation. Henderson’s answer focused on non-violence.

“The message I got from him was, ‘Stand up for what you believe in,’” Swan said. 

The school district paid nothing for the visit, except providing lunches for their guests, Swan said. The foundation left them with several copies of Henderson’s memoir for their libraries.

Sayaka Matsuoka contributed reporting.