The Black Students Who Wouldn't Leave the Lunch Counter- RIP Franklin McCain

[octoberlib]

What happened in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960, took even John Lewis by surprise. In his memoir, Walking With the Wind, the future civil rights icon (whose most intense days at the head of the movement were yet ahead of him as that decade began) recounted the episode:

There were four guys in Greensboro, all of them freshman at North Carolina A&T College. They had no plan, no preparation. One of them had read that FOR comic book about King and Montgomery, they had begun talking about the process of nonviolent action, and on this particular afternoon they simply decided it was time for them to do something.

Which they did, taking four seats late that day at the whites-only lunch counter of Greensboro's downtown Woolworth's store and touching off what would come to be called the sit-in movement across the South. It happened so spontaneously, so suddenly, that the next morning's newspapers contained no accounts of the incident.
One of those brave students was Franklin McCain, who died Thursday at the age of 72. In its obituary Friday, the Charlotte Observer recounted this story, which offers some insight into McCain's motivations:

In an Observer story in 2010, on the 50th anniversary of the sit-in, McCain said he had been told by his parents and grandparents that if they followed the Bill of Rights, Constitution and Ten Commandments, and if they worked hard and helped others, they had a good chance of success. “The system still betrayed us,” McCain said. “I considered myself as part of the big lie. All four of us did.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/the-black-students-who-wouldnt-leave-the-lunch-counter/282986/

[Cha]

1. ..

RIPeace Franklin McCain

[myrna minx]

2. .

[Scuba]

3. Thank you Franklin McCain.

[shenmue]

4. Rest in peace

[AverageJoe90]

5. R.I.P. Franklin McCain. May your legacy live on forever.....

[Hoyt]

6. Those were some brave young men who accomplished a great deal.

[okaawhatever]

7. Thank you and R.I.P. nt

[Eleanors38]

8. These brave men skillfully used the new mass media

To influence a nation and legitimize a movement. I remember seeing the sit-ins on the tube right after they happened. Silence filled our livingroom, such was their power.

[Oilwellian]

9. One of the original, iconic photos

This act was widely considered to be a pivotal moment in the American Civil Rights Movement.



The next day, the four young men returned with 19 supporters. By the third day, the number had risen to 85, including white and black students from neighboring colleges. Before the week was out, there were 400. They demonstrated in shifts so they wouldn’t miss classes.



On July 25, nearly six months later, Woolworth’s agreed to desegregate the lunch counter.

Thank you, Franklin McCain.

K&R

[George II]

10. What a simple, yet powerful and historic event!

And not a hint of violence on either side.

THAT is how to change policy and law!

[jtuck004]

13. There was plenty of violence around it. There was none that night, or the next day, but after that

things changed. And as the protests spread, the violence escalated to more vicious beatings and police violence, up to and including the images seen on TV in 1963.

Birmingham, btw, was a particularly brave action, because what was about to happen was known to nearly everyone who marched into that terrible day, and the reason for that was all the violence that preceded it They needed the federal government and the people of the country to take notice, and they calculated that most people would not be able to stomach the images of people being bitten by police dogs and assaulted with fire hoses.

And they were right.

[sheshe2]

11. They had courage.

RIP Franklin McCain~

[theHandpuppet]

21. An act of courage that changed our world

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."
-- Nelson Mandela

[jtuck004]

12. I do wish people would quit saying these things were spontaneous. They weren't.

The article says no plan, no preparation, makes it sound like they were just walking down the street and this happened, and that's simply not the case.

At least one of them recounts in an oral history the learning they did before this took place, and Exell had actually been turned away for service at that same counter two years previously. Rosa Parks worked for and studied with the NAACP, these guys had seen challenges to public institutions in Brown V Board, Parks a few years earlier, and the Little Rock 9 before that. Clara Luper led people into Katz drugstore in Oklahoma City in 1958 (quite a woman, btw).
A lot had been going on, and although this was a new front, it didn't happen in a vacuum.

Bennett College for Women and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (NCA&T) are two Black colleges in Greensboro NC. In the Fall of 1959, the Bennett College NAACP chapter discusses strategies and tactics for opposing segregation. The young women seek information from the Oklahoma City NAACP, which had previously used nonviolent direct-action to desegregate local restaurants. They decide to target the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro because it is part of a national chain that Blacks all over the country patronize. The president of Bennett advises them to hold off until after the long Christmas break, so that their campaign does not begin, and then lose momentum when the students return home for the holidays.

On February 1, 1960, four Black men from NCA&T — Ezell Blair Jr, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond — sit down at Woolworth's whites only” lunch counter and ask to be served coffee and doughnuts. They are refused. Though they are prepared to be arrested that does not occur. They stay until the store closes. The next day they return, now joined by Billy Smith, Clarence Henderson, and others. They sit from 11am to 3pm but again are not served. While they wait, they study and do their school work. The local newspaper and TV station cover this second sit-in. At first they call it a “Sit down,” but soon everyone is using the term “Sit-In.”
...

PDF, here.

Their unique contribution was to go after private enterprise. And they did a damn good job of it. But they had their heads on straight, and they had learned how to go about this from the many actions before and the people that were around them.

The other things that made it successful was their understanding of the need to go back and get others involved, and then to seek the help of competent leadership to drive it forward.

They were all interviewed, and one of Ezell's interviews lives here, where he talks about the years before.

It is important to note that these country-altering events didn't just happen. They involved training, study, organization, leadership and sacrifice, sometimes of people's lives. It detracts from their work to fail to acknowledge those things, and gives people a false impression of how such things work in the real world. Without those things, they might never have enjoyed the success they did. For those who want to move us forward, (and we badly need to move) to forget that such things were an integral part of their efforts is to invite failure or, even worse, get good people hurt for nothing.

[octoberlib]

15. Actually, John Lewis was the one who said "no plan, no preparation".

That paragraph was taken from his book.

[jtuck004]

16. And yet, as is clear from all the events and documentation

around him, there was.

But I think people took what he said differently from how he meant it. He is saying there wasn't a big plan to go do this by some org. Not that the guys who did it were completely unprepared or had no background, or that there weren't other events connected to it.

Might also be that since he came along after them, he didn't really know what they might have studied or learned.

[octoberlib]

17. Very true. Thanks for your post. It was informative. nt

[RainDog]

14. k&r n/t

[ProgressSaves]

18. True American heroes. nt

[johnnyreb]

19. +1

American heroes.

[xfundy]

20. Even a few kids can change the world.

That took some amazing grit. Imagine how scared they must have been! And if not for (real) journalists and photographers, they might have been killed and the whole incident would have "never happened."