Negro Sitdowns Stir Fear Of Wider Unrest in South
By Claude Sitton
Special to The New York Times
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 harlotte, N. C., Feb. 14 -- 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."
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