The Counter Revolution
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/opinion/01greensboro.html
by HOWELL RAINES
Published: January 31, 2010
Henryville, Pa.
IN the pre-digital America of 1960, "viral" was still a medical term.
So it was written in countless news articles that the student sit-in
movement had "spread like wildfire" on black campuses across the
South. On the morning of Feb. 1, 50 years ago today, four black
freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University seated themselves at
the all-white lunch counter in a Woolworth's dime store in
Greensboro. Within hours, news of this bold act by the Greensboro
Four, as they would come to be called, had grapevined its way from
A&T to the campuses of historically black colleges in Atlanta and Nashville.
All Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond and Joe McNeil
did was ask for coffee and doughnuts and politely decline to move
until they were served and try to engage a flustered white waitress
and a bumbling store manager in a Socratic dialogue about the
meanings of "serve." Then, just like that, the black preachers who
had challenged segregation in citadel cities like Montgomery, Ala.,
and Atlanta had found their natural allies: thousands of students who
would become, before the end of the month, the shock troops of the
civil rights movement.
It was always a fractious alliance. Not surprisingly, imposing black
elders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. did not like being booed
during church rallies for moving too slowly by militant students,
many of whom cast themselves as radical Christian activists. But
together, the team of preachers and students would show, within the
space of three years, that the edifice of segregation was a lot like
Georgia's Stone Mountain, that imposing Confederate monument whose
soft, exfoliating rock turns to dust under the hammer.
Now at the remove of 50 years, we can ask how it happened so fast
but not only that. We can also usefully ask how such an idealistic
and altruistic movement might fare in today's media environment. As
Jack Bass, a Southern newspaperman turned historian, observed when we
talked the other day, it was a time when everybody watched the three
network news programs. It was also a time when hysterical jeremiads
about the perils of change were not part of the mainstream news flow.
Sure, conservative columnists like Rowland Evans and Robert Novak
clucked about Communist influence on the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, and Paul Harvey seemed vaguely disturbed by
dark-skinned youngsters who talked back to Southern sheriffs. But
straight, eyewitness reporting dominated television news, and
Northern print reporters flooding the region quickly shamed Southern
newspapers into covering civil rights in a way that began to look,
let us say, balanced or even, in a few cities, fair.
What seems remarkable in retrospect is the factual authority of
network news in those days. Dixie's politicians, of course, accused
the national anchors of bias. But the pictures trumped the
home-cooked propaganda, as when you put a spittle-spraying Southern
governor up against a Greensboro Four leader like Franklin McCain, in
his earnest Sunday clothes, offering a cogent critique of Woolworth's
Southern business strategy as it related to black shoppers
nationwide. It took only one national telecast of Nashville students
being assaulted at the lunch counters to demonstrate that segregation
everywhere depended on the unconstitutional application of police brutality.
With such an agenda of real news, how one dreaded seeing some
ponderous network commentator interrupt the reporters to claim his 90
seconds of air time. There was simply no need to put a scrim of
opinion between the viewer and fresh news film.
Today, however, there's no denying that traditional reportage of
political and social trends seems almost as out of date as
segregation. Surely the civil rights movement would have been
hampered by the politicized, oppositional journalism that flows from
Fox News and the cable talk shows. Luckily for the South, that kind
of butchered news was left mostly to a few extremist newspapers in
Virginia and Mississippi and to local AM radio talk shows that
specialized in segregationist rants.
As for the nonpartisan press, it had to race to keep up with events.
As it happens, Franklin McCain, whom I interviewed in 1975 about that
first sit-in, and I both finished college in 1964, the fraught year
that saw the outlawing of segregation in all public facilities
throughout the nation. The next year brought the Selma March and the
Voting Rights Act, the legislative culmination of the civil protests
set in motion by the Greensboro sit-in, which is to be commemorated
today in a ceremony attended by Mr. McCain and his two surviving
colleagues, Mr. McNeil and Jibreel Khazan (formerly Mr. Blair).
In retrospect, what seems most striking to me is how inaccurate I and
many others in my generation of journalists could be when we looked
away from the turbulent Southern streets and sought to predict the
region's future and the course of the civil rights movement.
As the sit-ins gave way to the Freedom Rides and then the mass
marches, we were often wrong about how long it was going to take to
destroy segregation in such bastions of discrimination as Birmingham
and the Mississippi Delta. We thought in terms of decades, of finally
reaching a new era of racial peace by the turn of the century.
Instead, by 1969, the first black student was elected to the
homecoming court at the University of Alabama. Symbolically, she was
the daughter of the Greensboro Four. Generationally, she was their peer.
We were also wrong, in the long haul, about the transforming effect
of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on Southern politics. For a dozen
years, it looked as if the New South would be dominated by biracial
coalition politics as practiced by centrist white politicians like
Jimmy Carter and former civil rights activists like Andrew Young. The
coming political order would be bipartisan as well, including
progressive Republicans like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. The last
thing we expected was a return to one-word politics, but that's what
evolved. Before 1960, the one word was "segregation." You could stamp
it on the most hapless of candidates and win an election. After 1980,
the one word became "conservative," as a label for the set of Bible
Belt social values that hardened into its present calcified state
with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Will this new monolith prove as fragile as Stone Mountain? Lyndon
Johnson didn't think so, having predicted as he signed the Voting
Rights Act that he was handing the South over to the Republicans.
That legislative instrument turned out to be another retrogressive
force in the South, albeit a more benign one than segregation was. In
the past 30 years, the law has been distorted to gerrymander the
region into safe Congressional districts for a great number of white
Republicans and a handful of black Democrats. Who would have
predicted that the death of de jure segregation would usher in a new
era of political segregation in elective politics?
Given the corrupt state of both Congressional parties, I'm not
suggesting that Southern Republicans are bad and Southern Democrats
are good. They are all dependent on money from the same corporate
donors, and the hatred of one political party for the other has a
chemically stable toxicity that has virtually eliminated the biracial
voting patterns that emerged in the South in the late '60s and early
'70s. What I am suggesting is that the one thing the South should
have learned in the past 50 years is that if we are going to hell in
a handbasket, we should at least be together in a basket of common purpose.
--
Howell Raines, a former executive editor of The Times, covered the
civil rights movement in the 1960s and '70s.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
