Sitting In

Today, Karen and I were teaching about Jonathan Kozol and his decision to use a Langston Hughes poem with his 4th graders that was against school district rules when we took off on a tangent about the sit-ins that occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960. That day, at about 4:30 pm, four Black college students defied racial segregation laws by sitting down at a Woolworth's lunch counter (Blacks could stand up at an adjacent snack bar) and refused to get up when they were denied service. These men, all freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, remained in their seats until the store closed unusually early. The next day, about 20 additional students joined the original 4 and the next phase of the Civil Rights Movement was launched, leading to the creation of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and the rise of such leaders as John Lewis, Diane Nash, Julian Bond, Marion Berry, and many others.

But what hit me in the moment that we turned to these sit-ins had to do with this question of how to decide what is right and how to act in light of that decision. When we asked students about Kozol's decision to consciously use a poem that was not part of the 4th grade curriculum, some said he did a wrong thing but for the right reasons. Others commented that it might have been against the rules, but it was still the right thing to do. I then challenged them and myself to put ourselves in the place of the four students from A&T. What would we do and why? And I knew, I just knew, that when I was a college student, I would not have done the right thing. I would have been too scared to sit-in. I knew the right thing was to defy the law and sit-in, if for no other reason than to uphold equality and justice, to do what needs to be done to create a decent society where no innocent person is forced to suffer public humiliation. But I would have lacked the guts to follow through on what I believed.

Imagine the courage of those men at that moment. There was a good chance they would be taunted, harassed, and even assaulted. And it was extremely likely that all the powers of the State would not support the protesters, but would back up the segregationists. It was a very risky thing to challenge segregation in those days. It could easily get you killed. So where did these men and so many others like them, a few Whites to be sure, but the vast majority Black, find the gumption, the sheer grit to do this?

My best guess is that they were tired in the same way that Rosa Parks was tired, not physically tired, as she is so often claimed to have been, but tired of being pushed around, tired of being constantly diminished, tired of being trampled on, tired of injustice. I am guessing, for I don't really know personally, that if you get pushed around enough, there is a point at which you just won't take it any more, even at risk of death. That is certainly part of what happened in the 1950s and 1960s when Black people, with very little support from non-Blacks, launched the Civil Rights Movement.

Incidentally, On July 25, 1960, a little less than 6 months after the original sit-ins, the Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter quietly began to serve Blacks, even when they were sitting down.