Remembering sit-ins

              Sit-ins revisited
Civil rights eventl
has 25th anniversary — D1i
	
	
Greensboro News & Record
U
Robert D. Benson, President and Publisher
Ben Bowers, Executive Editor
Ned Cline, Managing Editor
John R. Alexander, Editorial Page Editor
Friday, February 1,1985
A10
Editorials
Remembering sit-ins
They were four black teenagers who
were scared to death that cold February day in 1960 when they sat down at
the whites-only lunch counter at Wool-
worth's.
Little did the A&T students know
they were igniting a revolution. But as
the days and weeks wore on, their
brave gesture at Greensboro's downtown Woolworth's was followed by sit-
ins throughout the South. The long and
forbidding reign of Jim Crow in Dixie
was being challenged and would ultimately collapse.
The initial Greensboro sit-in occurred
25 years ago today. We celebrate the
occasion with mixed feelings.
We are proud that Greensboro, however reluctantly, served as the birthplace of the modern civil rights
movement. With its five college and
university campuses, its reputation for
racial moderation and its willingness to
accept, if not embrace, change, Greensboro was a logical setting for this historic event. That it occurred peacefully,
without the strong and sometimes violent resistance experienced in other
states, is to the community's credit,
But we also harbor a haunting feeling
of disbelief that this city and the South
were once pock-marked with ugly signs
reading "Colored Only" or "Whites
Only." Why did we accept it all so unthinkingly? That's the question our children sometimes ask when we tell them
about that grim world of segregation.
They don't understand. In retrospect,
neither do we. The question is not so
much why did the sit-ins occur here,
but why did they not occur earlier, either here or in some other segregated
city?
We tend to pat ourselves on the back
nowadays and say how far we have
come. But how far we have not come is
another feeling that surrounds our
thoughts about the anniversary.
Yes, we have desegregated schools,
restaurants, buses, hotels and other
places of public accommodation. But no,
we do not have a truly color-blind society. There is still racial discrimination
out there, though it masquerades irij
subtle disguises.
There is also the world of the have-l
nots, and they are often black people. I
The unemployment lines and statistics
show a high percentage of minorities I
living on the downside of economic!
prosperity. Is this the result of discrimination or other causes? We don't know.
But we do know that these people
haven't come so far after all.
And while Greensboro's new district I
system for electing City Council members has brought more minorities into
the political arena, their numbers are
still small in proportion to the city's
black population. The same goes for
some government agencies such as the |
police department, where there are 334
white employees but only 49 blacks.
So let's not be too smug about ourl
city and region as we commemorate the
25th anniversary of the sit-ins. Satisfaction should set in when we no longer
feel the gnawing need to review racial
progress. Only then will we have finally
arrived at the racial millennium.