Greensboro: Where The Movement Began

              Greensboro:
Where The Movement Began
Reviewed by      M^^
Edwin M. Yoder Jr.
[LUNCH AT THE FIVE AND
TEN. By Miles Wolff Jr. Stein
and Day. 191 pages. $5.95.
Woolworth's Lunch Counter, 1960
Miles Wolff Jr.
It was never obvious why
Greensboro, of all the smaller
cities M the mid-South,  should
have given birth to the lunch-
counter sit-ins of February 1960.
The town has its special qualities, of course — among them a
becoming c 1 i m a t e of political
tolerance that may be traced to
the influence of its 200-year-old
Quaker community. Yet the
Woolworth's lunch counter was
set then, as it is today, in a/
decaying downtown of unprepos4
sessing character — so much sol
that Louis Mumford, according
to a local tale, once called us
"the parking-lot city," while
years  earlier Will Rogers had
been reminded by Greensboro's
lone skyscraper of the first tgpth
in a baby's gaping mouth.Fl<\
Conservative \£*r
North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical College, the all-
Negro institution that supplied
the sit-inners (four freshmen,
three of them Greensboro boys)
had been a conservative school,
firmly set in the Southern pattern of educational paternalism
and overwhelmingly North Carolinian in flavor: no headquarters
of the "outside agitators" on
whom many a southerner tends
to blame any challenge to stale
or senseless custom. In the late
Fifties, both Dr. King and Thur-
good Marshall had been denied
permission to speak on the A&T
campus; both were "too controversial."
I  But it is not the purpose of
Miles Wolff Jr., the young author of this remarkable account,
to delve into the remote origins
of the sit-inr, rather to examine
their impact on the city and on ]
the   region.   According   to  Mr.
Wolff it  was  Ralph   Johns,   a
local habeWasher and political
"character"  (he once tried out
in   Hollywood  for  the   role  of
Rudolph Valentino) who prodded
the four A&T freshmen to take
their seats p o 1 i t e 1 y at Wool-
worth's all-white lunch counter.
'Massive'
Whoever inspired them, the
four were pioneers with a future. They began "the most
massive demonstration in the
| history of the South" — a movement that spred to 68 cities in 13
states by summer.
"The four boys (Wolff writes)
. .   sat down at the Woolworth
counter   at   a   time   when   the
world   situation   was   relatively
stable,   when   there   was   little
news to distract readers ... in
a moderate Southern city, conscious of its image and unwilling
to have the students arrested or
inflict violence on them ...
More important than the time or
place was the form. Here was a
protest against one of the most
obvious forms of discrimination,
in stores that invited Negroes to
shop."
Although measurable community sentiment seemed to agree I
with them that it was unjust to
ask Negroes to stand at a count-
where whites could sit, in a
store where they were otheBgiee
served on the same terms^rne
city was slow to act. Negotiations drew out; the sit-ins came
and went;   byx April, i the first
'arrests for "trespass'toccurred.
Woolworth's local manager, no
racist,  felt that his  store had
been  "singled out";   he would
integrate if other downtown res-
ta
feared loss of white customers!
could be equitably distributed.!
Woolworth's had no national pol-f
icy; it adhered to "local custom." ^P
. Lonely action
(Finally, neither the City Coun-i
cil (although it had been inte-|
m grated since   1951)   nor   the!
ChambeT^>fCommerce viewed |
the sit-ins, as they would today,
as  a  clearly  focused  issue of I
wide   implications.   It   was,   in
fact, the lonely initiative of |
Councilman Ed Zane,  a plain-
spoken Tennessean and a vice
president of the mammoth Burlington  Industries  textile  firm,
that led to the appointment of a |
negotiating committee. Other-
wise the sit-in s might have I
wound   down   as   vacation   approached or exploded into riot.    '
Violence was a constant possi-
b i 1 i t y.   Young   white   toughs I
(county boys, the city folk said)
crowded to the stores to razz
the   demonstrators,   occupying |
lunch counter stools in a "counter sit-in." In neighboring Rich-