“The post-Greensboro wave
of sit-ins could not have been so strikingly
successful had it not been for organizational
experience garnered during the protests of the
late Fifties.”
Aldon
Morris says other viewpoints on the sit-in
movement, from August Meier, Elliot Rudwick, Louis
Lomax and others have “have persistently portrayed
pre-existing organization as an after-the-fact
accretion on student spontaneity. The dominant
view is that SCLC, CORE, NAACP, and community
leaders rushed into a dynamic campus movement
after it was well underway.” Morris
argues the opposite: that the pre-existing
organizations of the late 1950s provided the
sit-ins with the resources and communication
networks needed for their emergence and
development. Between February 1st and
March 30th of 1960, major sit-in
demonstrations and related activity had been
conducted in at least sixty-nine Southern cities.
The very
rapid spread of sit-ins in 1960 was due to the
pre-existing organizational structures of the late
1950s. Spontaneous decisions had very little to do
with the growing phenomenon, which was in fact a
carefully planned, systematic attack on racial
segregation. The 1960 Greensboro sit-in marked the
apex of the civil rights movement, after which
time people who conducted sit-ins did so with a
greater knowledge of mutual support than those
before February 1st.
An
examination of two sit-in leaders whose activism
was effective both before and after February
1st illustrates the influence of the
pre-existing organizational support that
eventually led to the toppling of Jim Crow. I
chose to focus on Ronald Walters and James Lawson
because of their unique work in making sit-ins so
effective. Ronald
Walters, now a Professor of Political Science
at the University of Maryland, College Park,
established the model of the lunch counter sit-in,
while James Lawson, a civil rights
icon who is now a Distinguished
Visiting
Professor at Vanderbilt University, perfected
this model. Both men’s goals were to ensure the
full and complete integration of the segregated
lunch counter. Both activists contribute
significantly to the black radical tradition
before and after the first of February, 1960 in
ways that disprove the notion that student sit-ins
were “spontaneous.”
“The very rapid spread of
sit-ins was the result of a carefully planned,
systematic attack on racial
segregation.”
In 1958,
then twenty-year-old NAACP Youth Council member
Ronald Walters began sit-ins at the F.W.
Woolworth’s drugstore in downtown Wichita, Kansas.
Aldon Morris writes that Walters knew Clara Luper,
an NAACP Youth Council leader in Oklahoma City,
who organized her own sit-ins in less than a week
after Walters’ sit-in in her town. Working through
CORE and the local NAACP Youth Council, Clara
Luper’s personal friend, Mrs. Shirley Scaggins,
organized another group of sit-ins in nearby
Tulsa. The first sit-in cluster began in Oklahoma
and then spread to cities within a hundred mile
radius via established organizational and personal
networks. Walters writes that the
sit-ins in Oklahoma City were followed by protest
demonstrations in the Midwest such as one in St.
Louis that began on February 14th,
1959, initiated by the NAACP Youth group led
by William
Clay, who went on to become a
U.S. Congressman. Arguably, Ronald Walters started
the chain of lunch counter sit-ins that spread
from Wichita, Kansas, to Oklahoma City, to Tulsa,
then to St. Louis within a few months. This chain
of actions undoubtedly led to the pre-existing
organization that triggered the huge wave of
sit-ins after the Greensboro protest of February,
1960.
In
Nashville, Tennessee, in 1958 James Lawson and
other Nashville clergy began conducting what were
called “nonviolent workshops” – classes in which
Lawson taught local college students the
philosophy and tactics of nonviolence
protest. Many of the students in
Lawson’s workshops would become future officers of
the main organization at the vanguard of the
sit-in movement: the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lawson’s mentoring
of such future SNCC leaders as
John
Lewis (now a U.S. Congressman) and
Diane
Nash was an important part of
his contribution to radical activism both before
and after February 1st, 1960.
Journalist David Halberstam writes that Nashville
mayor Ben West’s decision to finally integrate the
lunch counters came from a direct dialogue with
one of Lawson’s students, Diane
Nash:
“Now standing on the top
of the courthouse steps, facing the mayor, she
[Nash] who had once been so afraid of
confrontation…could look at Ben West and see how
vulnerable he was. What she said next, she later
noted, came to her like a divine inspiration. Or
if not divine inspiration, at least a remembrance
of what Jim Lawson had taught them, that they had
to get people…to see one another as human beings
instead of enemies. So she asked Ben West to use
the prestige of his office to end racial
segregation...’Yes,’ he found himself saying…They
had won, she was sure. The next day’s
Tennessean banner headline said it all:
INTEGRATE COUNTERS – MAYOR.”
The February – May, 1960
Nashville sit-ins and scores of others that year
are often described as “inspired” by the
Greensboro protests that also began in February.
In fact, 1960 marked an escalation of a civil
rights offensive that had begun carefully mapping
its way in the Fifties. The sit-in movement was,
in turn, built upon deep layers of African
American organizational experience stretching back
generations.
“Black folks did not
simply clap and sway their way into winning
strategies to defeat Jim
Crow.”
Thus, even this brief
snapshot of the pre- and post-1960 sit-ins, and a
few of the individuals involved, puts the lie to
the common, essentially racist assumption that
Black folks of the period acted on impulse rather
than forethought; that they somehow clapped and
swayed their way into the winning strategies that
brought down the fortresses of Jim Crow. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
The two notables who are
the focus of the study in which I am currently
immersed – Ronald Walters and James Lawson – are
important personages whose activism spans several
distinct periods of the modern Black Freedom
Struggle, and remain prodigiously active to this
day. Their protégés, and those who were mentored
and inspired by others, proceeded to change the
world – and were themselves transformed in the
process.
Spontaneity had very
little to do with it.
The author would like
to dedicate this article to a devoted nonviolent
minister in the true Christian sense, Christopher
Staniel Simmons,
1979-2006.
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