Countering Murder with Courage

[Judi Lynn]

April 30 - May 2, 2010

50 Years Later, the Civil Rights Struggle Continues
Countering Murder with Courage
By SAUL LANDAU

On February 1, 1960, four black students took seats at a lunch counter at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s. The white waitresses ignored them. They remained in their seats. Supervisors told them to leave. Woolworth’s in North Carolina didn’t serve colored people. The students refused to move and demanded service.

In the early Spring of 1960, I went with two other students from Madison, Wisconsin, to Montgomery, Alabama, to try to build a civil rights support network. We met with Reverend Ralph Abernathy in Montgomery and established links with his church; then to Birmingham and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.

As we descended the steps of his church an Alabama state policeman met us and told us to drive to the Mississippi border without stopping. He followed us, red light on top of his car blinking. As we entered Mississippi, a highway patrol car met us. That cop delivered similar orders and followed us to the Tennessee border. The white power felt uneasy.

Within a year, thousands of black and whites, mainly students began to participate in sit-ins. They staged pickets of Woolworth stores in the North to support integration of lunch counters in the South. What began as one “action” evolved into a nationwide movement. I sat in with thousands of others at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel to force management to integrate staff, and at auto-row to insure the hiring of black salesmen. At Lucky Supermarkets integration activists filled shopping carts with groceries, placed them on the conveyer belt and left the store -- to force Lucky to hire people of color at check out counters.

On April 17, 2010, some of those sit-in organizers heard Attorney General Eric Holder. “There is a direct line from that lunch counter to the Oval Office,” he told the 1,500 people assembled to celebrate the 50th anniversary of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) at Shaw University in Raleigh North Carolina. “If not for SNCC,” Holder said, “I would not be Attorney General. If not for SNCC, Barak Obama would not be President.”

SNCC became a school for organizers. Mario Savio learned from Bob Moses at the Mississippi SNCC project and returned to Berkeley to become the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement. David Harris went from SNCC to non-violent anti-war protests.

A de-segregation movement aimed at public services and accommodations evolved into a dynamic social and political force. In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the Jim Crow whites at the Democratic convention. They failed to get seated, but on March 15, 1965, following a police attack against non-violent integrationists preparing a march to Montgomery that killed Rev. James Reeb, a white northerner, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed, “We shall overcome,” to push passage of the Voting Rights Bill.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/landau04302010.html