Sit-ins roundtable

Again, seriously overdue on posting this, particularly since the roundtable happened last Friday, but I still wanted to share bits and pieces. Just as background, as you likely know, last Friday was the 48th anniversary of the beginning of the sit-in movement, when four A&T students, Ezell Blair, Jr., (now Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil, sat down at the segregated Woolworth's counter in downtown Greensboro, reinvigorating the civil rights movement and, as the three surviving members said last Friday, putting a "down payment on our manhood."

Highlights from the roundtable included:

• They consider themselves the A&T Four, not the Greensboro Four. Though the whole city claims them and their actions now, in 1960, A&T was really a separate and self-contained city.
• Dr. Warmoth Thomas Gibbs, then the president of A&T, was asked to talk the Four out of the protest, to which he reportedly replied, "We don't teach our students what to think; we teach them how to think."
  
• Lewis Brandon, who was an A&T student at the time, and the first winner of the Human Rights Medal in 2002, said, "Greensboro likes to think of itself as progressive, especially in race relations. But Greensboro has never made change without a struggle from the community."
  
• When asked by a student how they feel about A&T now, McCain said, "I'm proud of the institution but I'm not satisfied that students are doing enough," he went on to say that he felt the same way when he was a student. (As a funny side note to that question, he made mention of his mother not abiding him wearing a hat inside the house and a student immediate removed his toboggan.)
  
• McCain also advised, "Don't wait for the masses to act on your concerns because the masses didn't come February 1, 1960, and they're not coming February 1, 2008."
• Perhaps most importantly, McCain also said that the reason people are born with the capacity to do more than survive is because it is our job to take care of the least among us, that we're supposed to leave the world a better place than we found it. Buying fancy cars and starting families is all well and good, he said, but it's not the point.

A final note: My friend, Diane, and I were among the five white people there, in a turn-out that I expected to be standing room only but was instead filled with empty seats. It made me wonder a couple of things:

1. Though African Americans were, clearly, the leaders and motivators of the civil rights movement, have we forgotten that people of all ethnicities, including whites, played significant supporting roles? That issues that affect minorities are issues that we must all address to have the best possible America?
   
2. Have we reached a place where we have made enough gains in minority rights that we have gotten lazy? I wonder this not just about issues related to people of color but also about feminism... We do not have true equality - we have earnings disparities, health care disparities, legal disparities - and yet not enough people turned out to hear the wisdom of living civil rights legends to fill a modestly-sized auditorium?