Sit-ins just one step in continuing journey to promised land

              Sit-ins just one step in
-B      • # A
continuing journey to promised land
By WILLIAM H. CHAFE
Special to the News and Record
Thirty years ago, it happened — a benchmark in the
history of freedom. Four young North Carolina A&T
State University students, frightened for their safety
and worried about the job security of their parents,
decided that they must act to end the evil of racism.
Having come to political consciousness in the years
surrounding the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs.
Board of Education decision to end segregation, they
knew all too well that nothing had changed. Now, if
they failed to act, they would become accomplices in
perpetuating the scourge.
They went down to Woolworth's, bought some school
supplies, held on to their receipts, and then sat down at
the lunch counter to order some coffee. "We don't serve
Negroes," they were told. "But you served us at the
other counters," they replied.
Opening their books, they began to study,
determined to stay until they received the equal
treatment to which they were entitled as American
William H. Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of
Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom, which won
the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1981.
Events such as the
"sit-ins" become even
more of a shrine at
which we worship, and
we forget that as
history changes,
conditions change,
and the response of
one generation must
— and should be —
different from the
response of another.
William H. Chafe
citizens. The next day, 23 of their classmates joined
them, the day after that 66; then there were 100, and on
day five, 1,000 students marched through downtown
Greensboro to demand their freedom.
Within two months, the sit-ins had spread to 54 cities
in nine different states. A revolution had begun.
In recalling the drama of those days, it is tempting to
build a shrine around the event and the participants. On
anniversaries such as this,   ;e come to worship at that
B6 Greensboro News & Record, Sunday, January 28, 1990
shrine, to commemorate a miracle, perhaps in thej
process to pray for another one.
Yet, if we do that, we dishonor that moment we
commemorate, its meaning, and its relevance to where
we are today.
Perhaps the first lesson of the Greensboro sit-ins is to
realize that they were not an "Immaculate Conception,"
some miracle of divine intervention. It was important,
as the sit-in demonstrators have often said, that they
were young, and had the psychic and social freedom to
devise new and daring tactics to assault racism.
But they did not reach that point without the ground
having been well-prepared by those who had come
before them. They were products of a community
already committed to fighting, in every conceivable
way, the stigma of segregation.
Their teachers at Dudley High School spurred them
on, Nell Coley telling her English classes that "the way
you find things need not happen .... 1 don't care if they
push and shove you, you must not accept
(discrimination)." Their ministers did the same, with
preachers like Otis Hairston Jr. making the connection
between the Old Testament struggle to find the
promised land, and the quest for freedom in North
Carolina.
And their parents had often been in the forefront of
the battle to make the school board and local employers
I
change their ways. That battle was not easy, because
white Greensboro boasted of its "progressive" attitudes
and was adept at substituting good slogans for real
change.
But from their experience with these teachers,
(See Sit-ins, B6)
I