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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
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Full text | 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 |