Woolworth Story

              Giles Lambertson is i
columnist for the News* Record.
Consider the lunch counter: a
utilitarian structure with a rail for
the feet, a stool for the bottom
and a counter top for the elbows.
Hardly of romantic construction,
the simple luncheon counter nonetheless sparks warm — even hot
— memories around Greensboro.
It's been that way ever since that
February afternoon 25 years ago
when four A&T freshmen sat at
one. And sat. And sat.
This first
historic sit-in
happened at
the local
F.W. Wool-
worth store,
as everyone
around here
knows. Eighty years before, the national chain
store's namesake had introduced to
the world the
fi ve-and-
10-cent retailing concept — the
"dime store." By 1960, Wool-
worth's annual sales topped a billion dollars.
Greensboro's Woolworth store
on Elm Street was not an insignificant part of the New York-based
company. In 1960, the local unit
ranked 64th in retail sales out of
more than 2,000 Woolworth
stores. It was one of the top company stores in the South. More to
the point, it was the Number One
Woolworth store in the region in
restaurant sales.
Thus, fate may have drawn the
four A&T students to the busy
Elm Street Woolworth lunch
counter to launch their protest.
And not the least fateful element
in the little drama was the store's
manager, Clarence Lee (C.L.)
Harris.
Harris, now 80, was and is a
pre-eminent company man. Allegiance to an employer is not a
weakness, generally speaking,
and Harris' loyalty to Woolworth
and to the "dime store" goes way
back.
After his mother died when he
was an infant, Harris was raised
by two aunts in Durham. One of
the women worked at S.H. Kress
& Co., and the other was employed by, as fate would have it,
F.W. Woolworth.
Harris began working at a Durham Woolworth while still in high
school. He held that job and a second one for several years while attending Duke University where
he learned something about accounting and business law.
Greensboro News & Record,. Fri., Feb. 1, 1985J
Woolworth Story
When he finally came to
Greensboro in 1955 to manage the
Elm Street store, Harris was a
competent retailer. Sales at the
store had declined over the previous four years, but they turned
around the year Harris arrived
and reached a new peak in 1959.
And then the four young men
sat at his counter.
Good management handbooks
have not always had a section entitled, "How to Handle Civil
Rights Protests." I presume that
oversight has been corrected since
the turbulent 1960s when blacks
began to press for full citizenship.
Even so,- Harris was not totally
unprepared whert. the challenge
arose. '"'."-
In 1958, a year and a half before
the first sit-in, Harris wrote the
Woolworth district vice-president
in Atlanta in regard to Greensboro's segregated eating customs.
What if, he asked rhetorically,
blacks someday requested service
at the Elm Street store's counter?
He answered his own question
this way and suggested it as policy: No attempt should be made to
restrict the individuals, and no
arrest warrants for trespassing
should be sought. Such protesters
should be allowed to sit until they
tire, Harris suggested, whereupon they would leave and likely not
return. His supervisor agreed
with the strategy.
This was not by any stretch of
imagination an enlightened policy.
It was a nostrum that clearly did
not reflect the spirit of the Christian teachings in Harris' Protestant church. But it did perfectly
express the" company's policy of
abiding by local custom in establishing individual store rules; And
the custom in Greensboro in 1960
was that blacks and whites did not
publicly sit and eat together.
"Who was Woolworth to tell the
community that they would have
to accept blacks at their table?"
concluded Harris.
Yet the Woolworth manager
says he immediately realized
when students began their sit-in
that his contingency planning was
for naught. His method of dealing
with the protests was hot going to
work.
The sit-in was too disciplined,
for one thing, and too resourceful
(the entire A&T student body was
a potential pool of stool-sitters).
Within 24 hours of the first incident at his lunch counter,,Harris
says he could see that this protest
was not just going to get up arid
go away.  '