Author: Claude Sitton
Publication: The New York Times
Date: February 1, 1960
[Note from the Hindu Vivek Kendra:
Some of the comments made more than forty years ago do need to be reviewed
even today.]
Negro student demonstrations against
segregated eating facilities have raised grave questions in the South over
the future of the region's race relations. A sounding of opinion in the
affected areas showed that much more might be involved than the matter
of the Negro's right to sit at a lunch counter for a coffee break.
The demonstrations were generally
dismissed at first as another college fad of the 'panty-raid' variety.
This opinion lost adherents, however, as the movement spread from North
Carolina to Virginia, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee and involved
fifteen cities.
Some whites wrote off the episodes
as the work of "outside agitators." But even they conceded that the seeds
of dissent had fallen in fertile soil.
Backed by Negro Leaders
Appeals form white leaders to leaders
in the Negro community to halt the demonstrations bore little fruit. Instead
of the hoped-for statements of disapproval, many Negro professionals expressed
support for the demonstrators.
A handful of white students joined
the protests. And several state organizations endorsed it. Among them were
the North Carolina Council on Human Relations, an inter-racial group, and
the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice, which currently has an all-white
membership.
Students of race relations in the
area contended that the movement reflected growing dissatisfaction over
the slow pace of desegregation in schools and other public facilities.
It demonstrated, they said, a determination
to wipe out the last vestiges of segregation.
Moreover, these persons saw a shift
of leadership to younger, more militant Negroes. This, they said, is likely
to bring increasing use of passive resistance. The technique was conceived
by Mohandas K. Gandhi of India and popularized among Southern Negroes by
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He led the bus boycott in Montgomery,
Ala. He now heads the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a Negro
minister's group, which seeks to end discrimination.
Wide Support Indicated
Negro leaders said that this assessment
was correct. They disputed the argument heard among some whites that there
was no broad support for the demonstrations outside such organizations
as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
There was general agreement on all
sides that a sustained attempt to achieve desegregation now, particularly
in the Deep South, might breed racial conflict that the region's expanding
economy could ill afford.
The spark that touched off the protests
was provided by four freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical
College in Greensboro. Even Negroes class Greensboro as one of the most
progressive cities in the South in terms of race relations.
On Sunday night, Jan. 31, one of
the students sat thinking about discrimination.
"Segregation makes me feel that
I'm unwanted," McNeil A. Joseph said later in an interview. 'I don't want
my children exposed to it.'
The 17-year-old student from Wilmington,
N. C., said that he approached three of his classmates the next morning
and found them enthusiastic over a proposal that they demand service at
the lunch counter of a downtown variety store.
About 4:45 P.M. they entered the
F. W. Woolworth Company store on North Elm Street in the heart of Greensboro.
Mr. Joseph said he bought a tube of tooth paste and the others made similar
purchases. Then they sat down at the lunch counter.
Rebuked by a Negro
A Negro woman kitchen helper walked
up, according to the students, and told them, "You know you're not supposed
to be in here." She later called them "ignorant" and a "disgrace" to their
race.
The students then asked a white
waitress for coffee.
"I'm sorry but we don't serve colored
here," they quoted her.
"I beg your pardon," said Franklin
McCain, 18, of Washington, "you just served me at a counter two feet away.
Why is it that you serve me at one counter and deny me at another. Why
not stop serving me at all the counters."
The four students sat, coffee-less,
until the store closed at 5:30 P. M. Then, hearing that they might be prosecuted,
they went to the executive committee of the Greensboro N.A.A.C.P. to ask
advice.
"This was our first knowledge of
the demonstration," said Dr. George C. Simkins, who is president of the
organization. He said that he had then written to the New York headquarters
of the Congress of Racial Equality, which is known as CORE. He requested
assistance for the demonstrators, who numbered in the hundreds during the
following days.
Dr. Simkins, a dentist, explained
that he had heard of a successful attempt, led by CORE, to desegregate
a Baltimore restaurant and had read one of the organization's pamphlets.
CORE's field secretary, Gordon R.
Carey, arrived from New York on Feb. 7. He said that he had assisted Negro
students in some North Carolina cities after they had initiated the protests.
The Greensboro demonstrations and
the others that it triggered were spontaneous, according to Mr. Carey.
All of the Negroes questioned agreed on this.
The movement's chief targets were
two national variety chains, S. H. Kress & amp; Co. and the F. W. Woolworth
Company. Other chains were affected. In some cities the students demonstrated
at local stores.
The protests generally followed
similar patterns. Young men and women and, in one case, high school boys
and girls, walked into the stores and requested food service. Met with
refusals in all cases, they remained at the lunch counters in silent protest.
The reaction of store managers in
those instances was to close down the lunch counters and, when trouble
developed or bomb threats were received, the entire store.
Hastily painted signs, posted on
the counters, read: "Temporarily Closed," "Closed for Repairs," "Closed
in the Interest of Public Safety," "No Trespassing," and "We Reserve The
Right to Service the Public as We See Fit."
After a number of establishments
had shut down in High Point, N. C., the S. H. Kress & amp; Co. store
remained open, its lunch counter desegregated. The secret? No stools.
Asked how long the store had been
serving all comers on a stand-up basis, the manager replied:
"I don't know. I just got transferred
from Mississippi."
The demonstrations attracted crowds
of whites. At first the hecklers were youths with duck-tailed haircuts.
Some carried small Confederate battle flags. Later they were joined by
older men in faded khakis and overalls.
The Negro youths were challenged
to step outside and fight. Some of the remarks to the girls were jesting
in nature, such as, "How about a date when we integrate?" Other remarks
were not.
Negro Knocked Down
In a few cases the Negroes were
elbowed, jostled and shoved. Itching powder was sprinkled on them and they
were spattered with eggs.
At Rock Hill, S. C., a Negro youth
was knocked from a stool by a white beside whom he sat. A bottle of ammonia
was hurled through the door of a drug store there. The fumes brought tears
to the eyes of the demonstrators.
The only arrests reported involved
forty-three of the demonstrators. They were seized on a sidewalk outside
a Woolworth store at Raleigh shopping center. Charged with trespassing,
they posted $50 bonds and were released.
The management of the shopping center
contended that the sidewalk was private property.
In most cases, the demonstrators
sat or stood at store counters talking in low voices, studying or staring
impassively at their tormentors. There was little joking or smiling. Now
and then a girl giggled nervously. Some carried bibles.
Those at Rock Hill were described
by the local newspaper, The Evening Herald, as "orderly, polite, well-dressed
and quiet."
'Complicated Hospitality'
Questions to their leaders about
the reasons for the demonstrations drew such replies as:
"We feel if we can spend our money
on other goods we should be able to eat in the same establishments," "All
I want is to come in and place my order and be served and leave a tip if
I feel like it," and "This is definitely our purpose: integrated seating
facilities with no isolated spots, no certain seats, but to sit wherever
there is a vacancy."
Some newspapers noted the embarrassing
position in which the variety chains found themselves. The News and Observer
of Raleigh remarked editorially that in these stores the Negro was a guest,
who was cordially invited to the house but definitely not to the table.
"And to say the least, this was complicated hospitality."
The newspaper said that to serve
the Negroes might offend Southern whites while to do otherwise might result
in the loss of the Negro trade.
"This business," it went on, "is
causing headaches in New York and irritations in North Carolina. And somehow
it revolves around the old saying that you can't have your chocolate cake
and eat it too."
The Greensboro Daily news advocated
that the lunch counters be closed or else opened on a desegregated basis.
North Carolina's Attorney General,
Malcom B. Seawell, asserted that the students were causing "irreparable
harm" to relations between whites and Negroes.
Mayor William G. Enloe of Raleigh
termed it "regrettable that some of our young Negro students would risk
endangering these relations by seeking to change a long-standing custom
in a manner that is all but destined to fail."
Some North Carolinians found it
incomprehensible that the demonstrations were taking place in their state.
They pointed to the progress made here toward desegregation of public facilities.
A number of the larger cities in the Piedmont region, among them Greensboro,
voluntarily accepted token desegregation of their schools after the Supreme
Court's 1954 decisions.
But across the state there were
indications that the Negro had weighed token desegregation and found it
wanting.
When commenting on the subject,
the Rev. F. L. Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, Ala., drew a chorus of "amens"
from a packed N.A.A.C.P. meeting in a Greensboro church, "We don't want
token freedom," he declared. "We want full freedom. What would a token
dollar be worth?"
Warming to the subject, he shouted:
"You educated us. You taught us
to look up, white man. And we're looking up!"
Praising the demonstrators, he urged
his listeners to be ready "to go to jail with Jesus" if necessary to "remove
the dead albatross of segregation that makes America stink in the eyes
of the world."
John H. Wheeler, a Negro lawyer
who heads a Durham bank, said that the only difference among Negroes concerned
the "when" and "how" of the attack on segregation.
He contended that the question was
whether the South would grant the minority race full citizenship status
or commit economic suicide by refusing to do so.
The Durham Committee on Negro Affairs,
which includes persons from many economic levels, pointed out in a statement
that white officials had asked Negro leaders to stop the student demonstrations.
"It is our opinion," the statement
said, "that instead of expressing disapproval, we have an obligation to
support any peaceful movement which seeks to remove from the customs of
our beloved Southland those unfair practices based upon race and color
which have for so long a time been recognized as a stigma on our way of
life and stumbling block to social and economic progress of the region."
It then asserted:
"It is reasonable to expect that
our state officials will recognize their responsibility for helping North
Carolina live up to its reputation of being the enlightened, liberal and
progressive state, which our industry hunters have been representing it
to be."
The outlook for not only this state
but also for the entire region is for increasing Negro resistance to segregation,
according to Harold C. Fleming, executive director of the Southern Regional
Council. The council is an interracial group of Southern leaders with headquarters
in Atlanta. Its stated aim is the improvement of race relations.
"The lunch-counter 'sit-in'," Mr.
Fleming commented, "demonstrates something that the white community has
been reluctant to face: the mounting determination of Negroes to be rid
of all segregated barriers.
"Those who hoped that token legal
adjustments to school desegregation would dispose of the racial issues
are on notice to the contrary. We may expect more, not less, protests of
this kind against enforced segregation in public facilities and services
of all types."
