Media/Headlines
Activist recalls 'catalyst for Civil Rights'
Wednesday, February 2, 2000
Tuesday was a day of wreath laying, unveilings and street namings, all honoring ordinary men who took extraordinary action for freedom's sake.
The activities commemorated the Greensboro sit-ins, which began Feb. 1, 1960, when David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and Joseph McNeil challenged the South's status quo. The N.C. A&T freshmen refused to leave the all-white lunch counter at the Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro. Their defiance began a sit-in movement that swept the South and caused racial barriers to crack.
McCain, McNeil and Blair, who now goes by the name Jibreel Khazan, returned for the celebratory events Tuesday, with McCain and Khazan attending a wreath-laying at the grave of Richmond, who died 10 years ago this year. Carolina Biblical Gardens near Jamestown was so deep in snow that people had to stand on a road about 50 feet from Richmond's grave.
The audience gathered around the Rev. Otis Hairston, whose Shiloh Baptist Church served as control center for the sit-ins, which lasted six months before Woolworth's and the nearby Kress Five & Dime agreed to integrate.
Hairston was at the bedside of Richmond during the last hours of a life that, after the sit-ins, had been one of depression and health problems.
"He thought he had not done much and had made mistakes," Hairston said. Hairston assured Richmond that he brought about giant social change and that history would remember him. Shortly thereafter, the 49-year-old Richmond died from lung cancer.
"This was a day he really looked forward to," said Franklin Richmond, his younger brother, referring to the annual sit-in commemoration. Throughout the year David Richmond would go into schools to remind students that one person or a small group can make a difference, his brother said. David Richmond felt he might inspire a student just as Martin Luther King Jr. inspired the Richmond brothers in 1958 when they heard King speak at Bennett College.
"Dr. King touched me and he touched David, I'm sure," Franklin Richmond said. "After that, I would always sit up front of the bus, even if there were seats in the back."
Before a wreath could be placed Tuesday, Franklin Richmond kicked away the snow covering the flat stone that says, "David L. Richmond, 1941-1990, Civil Rights Hero, One of the Original Greensboro Four, Feb. 1, 1960, Love leads to Freedom."
Later Tuesday, at the old downtown dime store, children from five local schools formed an audience for a taped TV show. The audience sat in front of broadcast personality Lee Kinard, former Greensboro NAACP President George Simkins, civil rights activist Hal Sieber and the Rev. Derek King, the nephew of Martin Luther King Jr. The four sat on stools at the lunch counter, which displayed signs from 1960: coffee 10 cents, apple pie 25 cents.
Before going on the air, Jibreel Khazan, the most lighthearted of the Greensboro Four, warmed up the children by getting them to sing "It's Howdy Doody Time," the ditty that millions of children crooned each afternoon in the 1950s when the famous freckled puppet came on the TV with sidekick, Buffalo Bob Smith.
Khazan praised the show because it brought kids of different races together.
"Buffalo Bob had a great heart. God bless him," said Khazan, who grew up in Greensboro, graduated from Dudley High School and A&T and now lives in Massachusetts.
Khazan said the old dime store should be converted into a civil rights museum to remind today's youth of what they can accomplish.
"The important thing is that these sit-ins were led by youth," he said. "They came to define leadership in this country. ... This movement was the catalyst for all of the civil and human rights movements in America."During Tuesday's show, Derek King preached his uncle's philosophy of nonviolence, even though at one point Derek himself didn't practice it. "I felt like I needed to defend myself and I carried a handgun," he said.
He told the students that being nonviolent and turning the other cheek "doesn't make you a coward or a chicken, it makes you a hero."
Simkins was the first black person in Greensboro arrested for challenging the city's segregationist ways in the 1950s. He was charged with trespassing after he attempted to play golf at city-owned, but all-white, Gillespie Park Golf Course in 1955. As a result of Simkins' challenge, the city closed the golf course rather integrate it. The city didn't reopen the course for seven years.
Although Simkins had many confrontations with white people, he also had white allies during that period of racial turmoil. He told the students that to right racial wrongs, "you have to form coalitions with whites. Blacks can't do it alone. Get whites who believe in what you believe in and try to work things out."
Hal Sieber talked of the dream of turning the long-empty Woolworth's into a civil rights museum and urged the audience to get friends and family to make donations so it can happen.
A second pitch Tuesday came from Franklin McCain, who lives in Charlotte where he recently retired as a corporate executive. He said the time has come for the civil rights museum to be a reality - a place that would be "by and for the total community," he said.
"We need to finish it and use it and show leadership to the rest of the world," he said.
McCain proved himself a leader again when at the last minute he substituted as keynote speaker at a luncheon for Arun Gandhi, grandson of the late Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, who canceled because of the snow.
In the afternoon, Mayor Keith Holliday and Ron Chappell, who was representing Richmond, Ind., helped unveil a roadside marker on the edge of the Guilford College campus to honor the Underground Railroad. The series of trails that runaway slaves, helped by sympathetic white people, used to escape to the North started in 1819 in New Garden, a Quaker community that includes present Guilford College.
The day ended at a new subdivision, The Turning Point, a phrase some historians have used to describe the Greensboro sit-ins' role in the civil rights movement. The neighborhood of 50 homes was developed by Project Homestead, a nonprofit group specializing in affordable housing.
Khazan, McCain and Joseph McNeil, a retired police and military officer who lives in New York, cut the ribbon. A neighborhood street is named for each man. A street also is named for David Richmond and the late Ralph Johns, a white merchant who encouraged the four students to challenge segregation in Greensboro.