Media/Headlines
Spirit of Civil Rights Crosses Oceans, Time
Sunday, January 28, 1996
Friday's Woolworth sit-in commemoration features South Africa's ambassador to the U.S.
South African Ambassador Franklin Sonn will headline Friday's annual benefit to raise money for Greensboro's Woolworth sit-in museum.
The $100-a-plate banquet to raise funds for the renovation of the historic Elm Street store will include awards to some of the original participants in the February 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, local civil rights leader John Erwin and retired Greensboro Record reporter Jo Spivey.
Spivey was among the first reporters to chronicle the sit-in by four black A&T freshmen, which gained national attention and inspired similar civil disobedience movements in cities across the segregated South.
But in the years when the civil rights movement began to flag in the late 1960s, it was the inspiration of the South African struggle led by Nelson Mandela that kept the spirit alive in this country, said Guilford County Commissioner Melvin "Skip" Alston, a co-director of the museum foundation.
On behalf of Mandela, who is being awarded the foundation's civil rights honor, which last year went to Rosa Parks, Sonn will attend the banquet.
"The struggle for freedom in South Africa affected the entire world," Alston said. "Nelson Mandela rejuvenated the civil rights movement by not selling out or bowing down after all those years in jail (as a political prisoner)."
Also receiving awards will be Lewis Brandon and Frances Lewis, two sit-in participants who maintained the action in the weeks following the first sit-in at the segregated lunch counter.
Alston said the foundation has now raised enough donations and commitments to pay off the $625,000 mortgage on the vacant Woolworth's building by April. Former NAACP national fund-raiser Gil Jonas has joined the project, said Alston, with a goal of starting the $3.5 million renovation next fall.