Media/Headlines
Sit-ins demonstrate we are all powerful
January 29, 2010
A course I teach in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill combines the practice of interpretative journalism with a special focus on societal trends, economic shifts and politics in the American South. To give students context for writing about the region of today, I offer a series of lectures on Southern change since 1900.
A hundred years ago, or even 50, most Southerners could not have imagined what the South has become. And my students, most of them North Carolinians just entering their 20s, can hardly relate to the South in which I grew up. So I tell them stories from my own experiences in high school and college in 1960s Louisiana, and I show them a long segment of the documentary “February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four,’’ produced by Steven Channing and Rebecca Cerese.
By paying special attention to the opening act of the sit-in movement, I introduce them to a historical moment to which they can directly relate. It took place in a nearby North Carolina city, and critically, it came as a courageous initiative of university students who acted with elegant simplicity to confront a social injustice.
The documentary segment I use in class concludes with a map of the South illuminated by brush fires breaking out city by city across the region. It emphasizes the lesson that the Greensboro sit-ins served as not only a powerful local event, but also a regional transformational catalyst.
After much resistance, some of it violent, the South had its shackles of legalized segregation removed through civil rights laws and court rulings. Its black citizens, subsequently, joined the ranks of voters and elected officials, gained access to better schools and forged a stronger middle class.
Simultaneously, the disappearance of Jim Crow, combined with strategic public and private investments, propelled a dynamism that refurbished the South’s economy. Through the 1980s and especially the 1990s, the South outpaced the nation in both population and job growth.
With the banishment of Jim Crow and the region’s subsequent, not coincidental, economic bursting forth, the South left behind its old isolation from the rest of America. By the millions, people — whites, blacks and Latinos — now move to the South, not away from it. Especially notable is the complete reversal of the “Great Migration’’ of black people out of the South; in recent years, more black Americans moved to the South than to any other region.
Today’s South serves as the home base of global corporations, commercial banks of national stature, giants of the entertainment and media industries, automobile-assembly and auto-parts factories and tourism locales, retirement communities and restaurants of the highest caliber. Until the albatross of legalized segregation was lifted, the South could not develop as it has.
And yet, to assess the current state of the South is also to recognize the jolts the region has received from two recessions since 2000. Also, although there is less distance between the South and the nation economically, the region still feels effects from and needs responses to lingering inequities and injustices of the past.
As the Southern Politics course draws to a close at the end of a semester, my students and I consider the intricate matter of public leadership and governing power, which contains both the potential for corruption and the ability to do good.
I tell them that the story of the South during the past century is ultimately one that should give them hope and encouragement. Progress may not come easily or march in a straight line, but the South’s experience points to the ability of people to change a social system that had previously seemed impervious to change.
The anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins serves as a reminder to young Southerners that they, too, can act and lead in a hope-filled pursuit of a better future.
Ferrel Guillory is director of the UNC Program on Public Life.