Greensboro: Where The Movement Began

              |Greensboro:
[WforeThe Movement Began|
r
^
Woolworth's Lunch Counter, 1960
Miles
Wolff Jr.
it was never obvious why!
Greensboro, of all the smaller!
£ies M the mid-South, should!
have given birth to the lunch-1
counter sit-ins of February I960.1
The town has its special quah-1
ties, of course - among them a ■
Woolworth's lunch counter was I
set then, as it is today, in art
decaying downtown of unprepos-u
se sing character-so much sol
t Louis Mumford,  according
I to a local tale, once called us
"the parking-lot city," v %11 e .
years earlier Will Rogers had
been reminded by Greensboro s 1
Ee skyscraper of the first^th
in a baby's gaping mouth.[*&)
Conservative . V^   ■
North Carolina Agricultural I
and Technical College, the all- 1
Negro  institution  that supplied
le   sit-inners   (four   freshmen, 1
three of them Greensboro toys)
had been a conservative schoo1, I
firmly set in the Southern pat-
Item of educational paternalism I
land overwhelmingly North Care- I
llinian in flavor: no headquarters;
■ of the "outside agitators" —-
| whom many a southerner tends
3 blame any challenge to stale
or senseless custom. In the late
Fifties, both Dr. King and Thur-
good Marshall had been denied
permission to speak on the A&T
campus; both were "too controversial."
But it is not the purpose of
Miles Wolff Jr., the young author of this remarkable account,
to delve into the remote origins
of the sit-UE, rather to'examine
their impact} on the city and o-
region.   According   to  M
I Wolff -it  was  Ralph   Johns,
local haberdasher and pol.tica I
■■character"  (he once tried out I
■ in   Hollywood  for   the   role  ofl
■ Rudolph Valentino) who prodded I
I the four A&T freshmen to takeP
I their seats politely at Wool-|
I worth's all-white lunch counter.
I Whoever inspired them, thel
I four were pioneers with a fu-1
Iture.   They   began   "the   most|
■ massive   demonstration
■history of the South" - a move-1
■ ment that spred to 68 cities in 13 I
■ states by summer._
"The four boys (Wolff writes',
,   sat down at the Woolworth
I counter at a time when the
world situation was relatively
stable, when there was little
news to distract readers ... in
I a moderate Southern city, conscious of its image and unwilling
to have the students arrested or
inflict v i o 1 e n c e on them ...
More important than the time or
place was the form. Here was a
protest against one of the most
is forms of discrimination,
•es that invited Negroes to
I shop."
Although measurable community sentiment seemed to agree
with them that it was unjust to
ask Negroes to stand at a count-
f where whites could sit, in a
Itore where they were otheggse
■ served on the same termsTTne
■city was slow to act. Negotiations drew out; the sit-ins came
land went;   by; April,i the  first
^arrests for "trespass"occurred.l
Woolworth's local manager, no|
racist,  felt that his  store had!
sen   "singled out";   he  would!
itegrate if other ctowntownresj
(taunrteurs would so that thel
feared loss of white customers!
could be equitably distributed.!
Woolworth's had no national pol-l
icy;   it adhered to  "local cus-|
. Lonely action
J   Finally, neither the City Coun-B
■ cil (although it had been inte-B
Berated since 1951) nor the!
■Chamber of  Commerce viewed!
lit-ins, as they would today, I
_„., a clearly focused issue of |
Bwide implications. It was,
■fact, the lonely initiative of
1 Councilman Ed Zane   a plam-
■ spoken Tennessean and a vice
■ president of the mammoth Bur-
■lington   Industries  textile  firm,
■ that led to the appointment of a
■ negotiating committee. Other-
■wise the sit-ins might have
■ wound down as vacation ap-
■proached or exploded into not. X
■i Violence was a constant possi-1
Jb i 1 i t y    Young   white   toughs I
■ (county boys, the city folk said) I
■crowded to the stores to razz I
■the demonstrators, occupying I
■lunch counter stools in a "count- I
in." In neighboringjtich-j