Re-examining the sit-ins

              Re-examining
Greensboro News & Record
Sunday, June 25, 1989
the sit-ins
Lens of history distorts
struggle, activists say
By LEX ALEXANDER
Staff Writer
When Melvin "Skip" Alston appeared before the
Greensboro Planning Board last month to champion
a proposal to rename Asheboro Street after Martin
Luther King Jr., he was challenged by Planning
Board member David Dansby, who suggested that
other civil rights leaders, overlooked by history,
deserved the honor more.
Dansby, 49, also questioned Alston's knowledge
of civil rights history, asking him if he recognized the
names of various figures in the civil rights movement.
After the Planning Board voted to recommend
against renaming the street, Alston, 32, said angrily,
"I don't need a history lesson from David Dansby."
He vowed to appeal the decision to the Greensboro
City Council, which will consider the proposal Thursday.
On one level, the exchange between Dansby and
Alston was purely personal: Dansby defeated Alston
in December for the presidency of the Greensboro
branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the two men remain
rivals.
But the exchange also demonstrates how the lens
of memory and the lens of history can provide two
very different vistas. In Greensboro, many who participated in the civil rights movement believe that
the historical lens has provided only a fragmented
and distorted picture of their struggle.
That struggle did not begin in Greensboro, nor
did Greensboro's own civil rights movement begin
with that first sit-in, when four freshmen at then-
all-black N.C. Agricultural and Technical College
(now N.C. A&T State University) walked into the
Woolworth's downtown and asked for service at a
whites-only lunch counter. More sit-ins followed in
the days and months to follow.
The action marked the beginning of large-scale
demonstrations against segregated public accommodations locally and throughout the South. It jump-
started what had become an almost dormant civil
rights movement.
As Greensboro prepares to mark the 30th anniversary of the sit-ins, a lively re-evaluation of the
event's place in history is beginning to take shape.
The questions have particular poignance for aging
Greensboro blacks, who worry that their contributions — and the dangers they endured — will be
forgotten and that their grandchildren will never
understand the power of ordinary citizens to change
history.
"History has not been adequately told to these
young people," says Angeline Smith, a retired teacher at Smith and Dudley high schools who taught
David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel
Khazan), two of the four A&T freshmen who started
the sit-ins. "We need to push that to the forefront
with these children. It needs to be brought to them
more than just once a year."
"Memories are lost if things aren't taught," cautions Jibreel Khazan, who teaches developmentally
disabled people in New Bedford, Mass. "If it's not
taught over and over again to every new generation,
it's lost."
And, as Khazan acknowledges, the history of
civil-rights struggles in this country and of the sit-in
movement in Greensboro are taught in sketchy detail, if at all. As a result, even in Greensboro, young
people of all races are unlikely to be aware of the
contributions of many people of all races to racial
equality.
School textbooks typically compress accounts of
the civil rights movement and downplay the dangers
participants faced.
In recent years, more complete histories have
been published — books such as Washington Post
writer Juan Williams' Eyes on the Prize, which was
also made into a series for public television.
But schoolchildren are unlikely to benefit from
books aimed at adults. And even the newer books
tend to give activities in Greensboro short shrift.
As a result of the incomplete account they receive, young people are likely to view the civil-rights
movement as the product of a few superstar activists, or "demi-gods," as Khazan calls them — people
who are now either martyrs like Martin Luther King
Jr. or celebrities like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, with
even less relevance than pop singers to young people's daily lives.
"But in fact, most persons in the movement were