Look Out

“We must, at all times, watch what we say and what we do.”
This was one of the opening lines in the documentary we watched about the Greensboro Four. For all of their lives David Richmond, Frank McCain, Joseph McNeil, and Ezell Blair had known that they deserved basic human rights— even in a society which constantly adjusted the definition of equality. Yet, it wasn’t until January 31, 1960 that they planned to take action. As they sat down the next day, respectfully seeking service at Woolworth, the Greensboro Four were met with aggression from the staff and other customers, for the most part. One exception was an elderly Caucasian woman who commended the men for their integrity and argued that  more efforts for desegregation should have been happening before.

Though this woman’s words were meant with positivity and encouragement, I found them to be somewhat insensitive. In both the documentary, “February One” and the museum exhibit ( at the International Civil Rights Center), this white customer said, precisely: “This should have been happening a long time ago.” While I agree that those students should have had the right to dine in all along, the comment implied that black people should have had the courage to defy authority, before institutional racism became a phenomenon. Yet again, I will reiterate that the statement was made with good intentions. However, I think it is important to acknowledge that the Greensboro Four did not just wake up one day and say: “We’re gonna have a sit in!”

A theme that was made prevalent in our tour was how much care black Americans (especially in the south) needed to take in order to preserve their safety. Black men were (and still are) perceived as aggressors and criminals. In some areas, just looking at a white person could get them killed and  publicly mutilated. So, staging a full on sit in was not a matter of simply building courage; it was a risk that put the lives and well beings of four eighteen-year-olds in jeopardy. These four people, who were not much older than we are, offered to sacrifice everything in exchange for the possible desegregation of a department store. And to say that they should have done so already in validates the initial qualms of the Greensboro Four and other pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement.

————————————————————
Lesson of the day: In the preservation of one’s safety, there is a balance between caution and risk. Such a balance varies from person to person, concerning what they are willing to sacrifice for what they want.

And in 1960 David Richmond, Ezell Blair, Joe Mc.Neil, and Frank Mc.Cain— the Greensboro Four, were victorious in achieving that state of balance.

-Anonymous