Sixty five years ago this month, four freshmen at North Carolina A&T sat-in at the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter in Greensboro, NC. The young Black men had purchased items in the store and wanted to be served at the racially segregated lunch counter. After being denied service, they patiently sat there for hours until the manager decided to close the store. They returned the next day along with a few others and received the same treatment. This started the famous lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 that eventually spread to over 75 cities throughout the South. It also led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960. Veterans of those sit-ins continue to work for racial justice to this day through the SNCC Legacy Project. Mostly in their 80’s, they released a statement connecting their actions 65 years ago to the situation of our nation today. Listen to the words of these elders in the struggle for racial justice:
We are alarmed. Perhaps we are the best qualified to be alarmed. We organized and fought for civil rights in some of the most violently dangerous areas of the Black Belt South. Yet we live today in more dangerous times than we imagined our future would be 60-some-odd years ago…We think that there are lessons in what we struggled for, as well as what we struggled against, that are necessary to fully understand today. Our own experiences as Civil Rights Movement veterans leave us without illusions about the capacity of tyranny to take root. Today we see a national government taking shape that is reminiscent of the white supremacist Citizens Councils in Mississippi and throughout the South. And we remember that their viciousness was not only directed at civil rights activists and organizers, but at all people who criticized or stood in dissent of their practices and programs. Democracy is under serious assault with lies and disinformation leading the attack. The teaching of our nation’s history and our movement — and the critical issues that our movement addressed — is being distorted or outright banned. And those who teach these truths are, themselves, under attack, as are librarians who guide our children to books that will enrich their lives. Civil rights and civil liberties, ranging from the voting rights we so vigorously fought for to freedom of speech and association, are being challenged by anti-democratic oligarchies…Thus, we are compelled to speak; to ring an alarm bell if you will. After all, for all that we draw on from our past and carry with us today, we do not live in the past but for the future. It is what we have always done.
Please take the time to read and reflect on the words of our elders. This is not about partisan politics. Most of their struggles in 1960 were against local and state authorities of the Democratic Party. The fact that the current struggle involves the Republican Party is the result of the actions of that party rather than an automatic bias against the party itself. The witness of the elders of the1960 sit-ins is a call to actively challenge the threats to our democracy and to work for freedom and justice for all people. The two videos posted below provide glimpses into the actions and sacrifices made by the elders who issued the statement quoted above. That is the source of their authority to speak to us today.