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segregation
64 Years Ago Today - How Four College Students Started a Revolution
Those who decided to take action in 1960 changed the course of history. That's how change is made.
Feb 01, 2024
Late in the afternoon of February 1, 1960, four young black men—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, all students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro — visited the local Woolworth’s five-and-dime store. They purchased school supplies and toothpaste, and then they sat down at the store’s lunch counter and ordered coffee.
“I’m sorry,” said the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here.”
The four students refused to give up their seats until the store closed. The local media soon arrived and reported the sit-in on television and in the newspapers.
The four students returned the next day with more students, and by February 5 about 300 students had joined the protest, generating more media attention. Their action inspired students at other colleges across the South to follow their example. By the end of March, sit-ins had spread to 55 cities in 13 states.
Across the South, local white thugs tried to intimidate the sit-in protesters. They pelted them with food or ketchup and tried to provoke fights. But the students remained nonviolent and didn’t fight back.
Most conservatives and even some liberals—black and white—thought that the student activists were too radical. But their actions galvanized a new wave of civil rights protest.
Rather than arrest the thugs, local police arrested the protesters because what they were doing—resisting Jim Crow laws—was illegal. Over 1,500 students, mostly black but also white, were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, or disturbing the peace.
In hundreds of cities across the country, Americans of conscience—led by churches and synagogues, unions, and college students—demonstrated their support for the sit-ins by picketing in front of Woolworths stores, urging people to boycott the national chain until it desegregated its Southern lunch counters.
The Greensboro Woolworths ended its policy of segregation a few weeks after the North Carolina A&T students began their protest. Within months, hundreds of other lunch counters, department stores, and other retail businesses throughout the South announced plans to serve all customers equally. The sit-ins, the picketing by allies, the consumer boycott, and the negative publicity had worked.
Most conservatives and even some liberals—black and white—thought that the student activists were too radical. But their actions galvanized a new wave of civil rights protest.
At the invitation of organizer Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, several hundred sit-in activists and their allies came to Shaw University, a black college in Raleigh, North Carolina, over Easter weekend— which was April 16-18 that year—to discuss how to capitalize on the sit-ins’ growing momentum and publicity.
This gathering became the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Its growing base of supporters played key roles in the freedom rides, marches, and voter registration drives that eventually led Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
At that first SNCC meeting, folksinger Guy Carawan introduced and taught the song "We Shall Overcome" to the assembled activists. They quickly adopted the song as their own, using it to sustain their morale during protest marches, on the Freedom Ride buses, and in jail cells. It quickly spread throughout the civil rights movement and became its unofficial anthem.
Many SNCC activists became key leaders in subsequent battles for social justice. One was Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. Another was Congressman John Lewis, who courageously risked his life many times for social justice, but whom an ignorant Donald Trump, in one of his outrageous online tantrums, criticized as “all talk, no action.”
The kind of protest and civil disobedience utilized by the SNCC activists continues today in campaigns for environmental justice, workers’ and immigrant rights, tenant empowerment, and an end to racism, among other causes.
The struggle continues. This is how people make history.
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Julian Bond: Race Man, Poet, Movement-Builder -- and Friend
Aug 17, 2015
America has lost a great leader, and many of us lost a good friend.
By the time Julian Bond was 20 years old, he had helped lead the sit-in movement that began dismantling official segregation in Atlanta and he had left the academic life of Morehouse College to help found the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As the communications director of SNCC, he worked to call attention of the rest of the world to the struggle by some of the poorest, most disenfranchised Americans to wrest political power from the white establishment in some of the most dangerous parts of the Jim Crow South. SNCC was the #BlackLivesMatter movement before there were hashtags.
By the time he was 30 years old, Julian Bond had been elected to the Georgia Legislature, whose all-white members refused to seat him because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. He was elected to his own vacant seat three times and seated only after a unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court. Also, before he was thirty, he led an insurgent Georgia delegation to the 1968 Democratic Convention, where they unseated the segregationist "regular" democratic party delegation. And at that convention he was nominated for Vice-President - an office he was too young to win -- in order to raise the visibility of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war forces in the Democratic party.
For those of us becoming active in the movement -- especially those of us in the South -- Julian Bond was an absolute hero. He had the courage underfire of the SNCC organizers. And he stood up to the whole Georgia power structure not only against racism but also against the war in Vietnam. He was cool.
The man who shook the world at an early age stayed engaged -- as a movement builder and networker for our 21st Century movement. I first met him in 1970 when he and friends of mine from the Southern Students Organizing Committee worked together to create the Institute for Southern Studies.
He became Chairman of the NAACP in 1998 and worked with others to revitalize that old and respected organization. And he always sought to build a larger, more powerful progressive movement.
Julian was part of the core group who attended the first planning retreat that eventually gave birth to our economic-change organization, the Campaign for America's Future.
In June 2004, I had the honor of introducing Julian at our Take Back America conference. We asked him to speak at a fascinating plenary with the two founders of MoveOn.org, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. Everyone in the audience was transfixed as Julian imagined what SNCC organizing might have been like with the online networking, actions and fundraising that MoveOn were then pioneering. And Julian, Wes and Joan (who later helped launch Moms Rising) joined together to discuss how the work of the civil rights and anti-war movement had to be expanded to fight for the rights of women, families, LGBT people, and the rights of workers around the world.
Sunday night on PBS Newhour, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, another SNCC veteran, shared her memories of Julian -- and declared that she was unprepared because she had just seen him at a Howard University forum with Black Lives Matter activists, and, though she had memories of him going back to the 1960s, he was still a man of the moment:
What Julian managed to do was something that most of us who were in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, didn't do. He managed to spend his entire life in civil rights, not the sentimental civil rights of our SNCC days, but the civil rights of our time. And that's why he was so respected.
In addition to his ongoing movement-building, Julian eventually became a professor and a scholar, teaching, among other places, at the school I attended in the 1960s, the University of Virginia. He was teaching Southern history and the movements of the 1960s. In 1990, he invited me and another comrade from those days to take over one of his classes to talk to 300 of his students about the Virginia of the segregationist Sen. Harry Byrd machine -- and the almost completely segregated UVa. And, since it was Julian Bond's class, we were able to get the Charlottesville Daily Progress and the Cavalier Daily to come and cover a discussion of how things had changed at that campus and that Southern State -- and how they had not changed enough.
Julian only recently retired from teaching at UVa, and in the process of moving on, he gave an interview to the University of Virginia Magazine that is worth reading. At the end, he was asked, "What would you like your tombstone to say?" His answer was classic Julian:
I want to have a double-sided tombstone, so you have something on each side. And on one side, it's going to say "Race Man." A race man is an expression that's not used anymore, but it used to describe a man--usually a man, could have been a woman too--who was a good defender of the race, who didn't dislike white people, but who stood up for black people, who fought for black people. I'd want people to say that about me. He was a race man. There's no implication here that white people are evil, just that black people are good people and they need somebody to fight for them, and I'm that person. The other side is going to say "Easily Amused," because I am easily amused.
The obituary by Roy Reed that ran on the New York Times website on Sunday ended in a way that captured the easily amused and poetic, soulful side of Julian Bond.
His most famous [piece of poetry] was perhaps a two-line doggerel that he dashed off after one too many overly concerned white students offended him by saying, "If only they were all like you."
The verse:
Look at that girl shake that thing,
We can't all be Martin Luther King.
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Racialized Poverty in America has Nearly Doubled in 21st Century
New report finds mid-sized cities like Detroit and Milwaukee are ground zero for dramatic rise in segregation
Aug 10, 2015
Discriminatory housing, zoning, and other policy choices are driving the dramatic rise of racialized poverty and segregation across the United States, with the number of people residing in low-income "ghettos, barrios, and slums" nearly doubling in the 21st century alone, a new report finds.
Architecture of Segregation, authored by the Century Foundation fellow Paul Jargowsky, concludes that midsized cities of 500,000 to 1 million people like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Cleveland are ground zero for the rapid concentration of black poverty.
Poverty is becoming dramatically more concentrated, as "more than one in four of the black poor and nearly one in six of the Hispanic poor lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, compared to one in thirteen of the white poor," notes Jargowsky, who is also a professor of public policy at Rutgers University.
Children are the most vulnerable, he explains, as they are "more likely to reside in high-poverty neighborhoods than poor adults."
Jargowsky argues that these trends cannot be attributed solely to the Great Recession. They were established by policy choices implemented well before 2008, which drove the "rampant suburban and exurban development" behind today's segregation.
"Through exclusionary zoning and outright housing market discrimination, the upper-middle class and affluent could move to the suburbs, and the poor were left behind," he writes. "Public and assisted housing units were often constructed to reinforce existing spatial disparities. With gentrification driving up property values, rents, and taxes in many urban cores, some of the poor are moving out of central cities into decaying inner-ring suburbs."
Jargowsky concludes harrowingly: "Our governance and development practices ensure that significant segments of our population live in neighborhoods where there is no work, where there are underperforming schools, and where there is little access to opportunity."
The study follows other research which shows racial segregation is on the rise in the United States. A recent analysis by Cornell University researchers found that the foreclosure crisis that drove approximately 9 million people across the United States from their homes disproportionately displaced black and Latino households and led to a spike in segregation along racial lines.
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