Editorials
Listen to the footsteps
Early this morning, four former
A&T students retraced the steps
they took on Feb. 1, 1960, to the
Woolworth's lunch counter. They
were historic steps heard — and repeated — all across the South. Their
echoes still reverberate today.
These four men — Joseph McNeil,
David Richmond, Franklin McCain
and Jibreel Khazan, formerly Ezell
Blair Jr. — are the first to acknowledge that the idea of demanding service at the white-only lunch counter
did not spring full-blown from their
heads. There were dozens of others
who played significant roles in
launching the sit-ins.
Among these are Ralph Johns, the
white merchant who had encouraged
local blacks to resist segregation, and
who gave the students money so they
could go to Woolworth's as legitimate
customers that day; Willa Player,
then-president of Bennett College,
who supported the movement from
its start; George Simkins, president
of the local chapter of the NAACP,
who had previously worked to desegregate many of Greensboro's public
facilities; and a host of others.
The Jim Crow laws of segregation
were ready to crumble that day in
February, much as the Berlin Wall
and all it stood for have crumbled in
the past few weeks. But a wall does
not fall overnight; it must be worn
away. When these four students took
their courageous steps, they were following a path already worn by Rosa
Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Thur-
good Marshall and many others who
had taken risks and endured abuse
for equality.
The students were reservoirs for
all the frustration that had mounted
in the black community since the
U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of
Education. That 1954 decision held
out the promise of integration, but by
1960 it had not materialized. The
white South had not heard or heeded
the news: Jim Crow was dead.
Sit-ins changed South
So when these four freshmen took
their tentative steps toward the
lunch counter, they took them for all
black people, and for all time. Though
it may not have occurred to them,
they took those steps for all white
people, too.
By denying equal status to their
black brothers and sisters, white
Southerners were denying a part of
themselves. By preventing blacks
from sitting down at lunch counters,
whites were impoverishing their own
tables, both morally and physically.
The hatred and suspicion and stereotyping that were the scaffolding of
segregation were time-consuming
and debilitating to maintain. Separate but "equal" — one for whites,
half a loaf for blacks — was an elaborate, expensive system.
The integration that the sit-in era
ushered in has made possible so many
things, not least the South's new economic power. Only an increasingly
integrated work force, political system and educational structure could
have produced the fruits of the past
three decades. Last year's election of
L. Douglas Wilder as governor of
Virginia is the symbolic culmination
of all the activity touched off by those
lonely footsteps 30 years ago.
But just as breathtaking progress
has been made, it would be foolish to
suggest that full integration, much
less full racial understanding, has
been achieved. Racism and bigotry
still exist, and not just in the South.
That is why, this week, Greensboro must not merely celebrate a
bold event of 30 years ago, but reded-
icate itself to the proposition that all
people, regardless of race, creed or
national origin, deserve equal access
to opportunity.
But first, let us once again listen to
those long-ago footsteps that turned
segregation on its head.
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