About the publisher
My name is Chad Roberts, and I am a North Carolina A&T alumnus and Benbow Park resident.
I became somewhat familiar with the Benbow Road area while majoring in journalism & mass communications at A&T.
After leaving A&T in 2006, I worked at several newspapers before returning to Greensboro in 2010. A few years later, I moved into Benbow Park, and I’ve been getting history lessons about the area ever since.
About the South Benbow Future Outlook
For those not old enough to remember, the Future Outlook was a community newspaper that reported on Greensboro’s black community from 1941 until 1972. I became vaguely familiar with The Future Outlook during my time at the A&T Register. After a few years of living in Benbow Park, I learned that the publisher of The Future Outlook, James F. Johnson, once lived a couple of streets over from me on Drexmore Avenue.
From what I’ve been told, Mr. Johnson — or “Mr. Future Outlook,” as he was sometimes called by people in the area — would go to L. Richardson Hospital and take note of the babies being born, who had died, and who had been admitted to the hospital for treatment. Upon further research, I learned that there was a lot more to The Future Outlook than just births and deaths. Mr. Johnson’s newspaper reported on multiple aspects of Greensboro’s black community, including social gatherings and fraternity/sorority events, happenings at A&T, Bennett College and Dudley High School, and local, state and federal government actions that affected Greensboro.
Nearly 450 editions of Johnson’s Future Outlook have been digitized by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. Read them here.
About this website
It is a work in progress. As time goes by, it will be an encyclopedia of the people and places that make up this corner of Greensboro.
South Benbow Future Outlook 