Sit-Ins' Silver Day: A look at the lessons 25 years later

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The Sit-Insr Silver Day
A look at the lessons 25 years later
By William Chafe
Twenty-five years ago Feb. 1, four young
black freshmen at Greensboro's N.C. A&T
College walked into the downtown shopping
district, entered the local Woolworth's, purchased some small items, then sat at the lunch
counter and asked for a cup of coffee.
"We don't serve Negroes," the students were
told. But they refused to leave their seats. The
next day they returned, accompanied by 23 of
their classmates. The day after it was 6,>. The
next day more than a hundred. By the end of
the week a thousand students joined them in
downtown Greensboro, flooding the streets.
Within two months, similar demonstrations
had broken out in 54 cities in nine different
states. An entire generation had been waiting
to act, needing only a catalyst, and the Greensboro sit-ins had provided the spark. America
would never be quite the same again.
In looking back to those early days of 1960,
the mind is buffeted by conflicting images and
thoughts. How long ago, it seems. Yet how
recent. How simple and pure. Yet how complicated and difficult. How far we have come. Yet
how little has changed. Where did they get the
courage? How did we, or others like us, respond with such indifference and caution?
How wonderful that finally such a moral
travesty was corrected. How horrible that,
underneath it "all, the substance of our social
relations has remained so intact. How long?
Too long. When? Maybe never, unless somehow, sometime, some way, we find another
spark.
Some lessons do come through, loud and
clear. First is the fact that these young protestors did not come to their action as if in a
divine miracle. Rather, they were the product
of a struggle as old as slavery, as close to home
as their own parents, teachers and friends.
Many <if their fathers and mothers had been
activists. Some belonged to the NAACP, others
to churches which had been in the forefront of
efforts to build a better political and educational life for blacks. Many of the sit-in dem-
had attended Greensboro's Dudley
1~ School, the pride of the black c
ity and a place where teachers taught you to
aspire to be the best that was in yqu. "I had
to tell youngsters," recalled Dudley English
teacher Nell Coley, "I don't care if they push
and shove you, you must not accept discrimination . . . You are who you are."
The message the young protestors heard at
school was reinforced at home and in the
church. Some of the young students had belonged to the NAACP Youth Group, where
each week they discussed such national events
as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the fight
against desegregation in Little Rock, and wondered how to bring the lessons of those experiences back home to Greensboro.
When Martin Luther King, Jr., came to
The North Carolin;
They believed totally in America. They had faith
that white people, once shown the immorality
of discrimination, would abolish it posthaste.
Greensboro in 1958 to preach about Chri;
message to America, things began to fall ir
place. King's sermon was "so strong," o
demonstrator recalled, "that I could feel my I
heart palpitating. It brought tears to my eyes."
The first lesson of Greensboro, then, was |
that the sit-ins were the result of a long gestation process, reflecting the strength, the o
mitment and the resiliency of segregated ir
tutions in a segregated community where
years family, friends and teachers had been I
building the foundations for freedom.
The second lesson had to do with Greensboro itself, a microcosm of North Carolina's
"moderate" and self-defined "progressive'1
white population — perhaps even a microcosm
of white America. Greensboro's political and |
economic leaders practiced a very sophisticated form of racism.
In 1957, the school board approved "token" I
integration, admitting six blacks to previously I
all-white schools. They took pride in the favor- "
able national publicity that resulted. But as
school board chairman later said, the aci
was taken, not to.promote integration, but to I
"hold an umbrella" over the rest of the state I
and preserve segregation, since as long as one |
or two school districts had token desegregation, it would be impossible for the NAACP tc
launch a class-action suit against the entire
state. Thereafter, no matter how many black |
parents applied for transfer of their children to I
previously all-white schools, the board stood I
Once, when the parents of four children I
brought suit and threatened to blow open the I
entire desegregation process, the school board I
seemed to concede, admitting the four s
dents to their formerly all-white neighborhood I
schools. But then, two months later, it trans- [
ferred every white student and faculty member I
out of the schools, replacing all of them w
blacks. When the parents went back to cour
protest, the board said that their case \
"moot" because now the students were as- I
signed to the schools that they had initially I
applied to attend. It was, one white observer I
said, "One of the cleverest legal maneuvers yet I
used in the desegregation field."