'SIT DOWN CHILLUN, SIT DOWN!'

...They know that their recent gains have proceeded from the fact that they've had the power of Big Daddy, the federal government, to back them up in their demands and they want to carry out these demonstrations at the legally defensible level...

...They stand and sing together, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of of the Lord...

...Perhaps the one that says: "Look down, look down, that lonesome road Before you travel on...

...The ministers who go to the prison to visit them each day come out cheered and lifted...

...Many of the boys and girls were knocked down, the force of the water was so strong...

...The manager of the lunch counter did not talk with tlhem then, and neither did the police who came and watched them until they left at 5:30, when the store closed...

...Nothing can stop us...

...But they did not come...

...f A white reporter in Tennessee: "The NAACP has now become the conservative force in the Negro community...

...Another important aspect of the student protest is that it is elevating the whole debate of Negro rights from the legal to the moral level...

...Charles Steele, of Tallahassee, spoke recently about the students in that city who chose to go to jail rather than permit their elders to pay fines for them...

...Do they frighten the students...

...Don't hold conversations with floor workers...

...The heaviest ammunition the Negroes were carrying were their Bibles and hymn books...

...more than seventy in Marshall, Texas...

...We have to do this and we're determined...

...Those men you called in didn't speak for us.' The chairman and all the other white men were astonished...

...One of the placards carried during a South Carolina demonstration said: "My Grandfather Fought in World War I, My Father Fought in World War II, I'm Willing to Fight in World War III—But We Want Equal Rights...

...Waitress: "I'm sorry...

...As college students, we have no jobs from which to be fired by people who don't like to see us assert ourselves...

...Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text...

...It was that way in many cities...

...Franklin McLain was from Washington, D.C., and Joseph McNeil from Wilmington, N. C. Before they sat down to eat, the students had purchased one or two small articles at a nearby counter...

...To react to these events with the old conditioned reflexes—indignation, reprisal, new laws, and prosecutions—is absurd...

...A white Southerner phrased the idea in a slightly different way: "Most of us can't talk about the case of so-and-so versus so-and-so, and the federal appellate court decision in an Alexandria, Virginia, restaurant case...

...The new Negro has also developed, or is developing, a new leadership...

...They call each other "coon" and "nigger" with a harshness and frequency that belies how deeply such terms have wounded them in the past...

...But it is precisely this situation that makes "token integration" unrealistic...

...In Houston, where the initials KKK were carved into the flesh of a Negro's chest and stomach, Negro leaders agreed it was an effort to frighten off further sit-ins...

...No single individual or central clique has, or probably could have, called forth the individual commitments and group activities that have taken place throughout the Southern states...

...The Reverend Douglas Moore, a Methodist pastor from Durham, N.C., said recently, "For this movement to have meaning two things had to happen: first, a church with a wide mass base had to move and, second, students who could be controlled by neither the white power structure nor the black power structure had to move...

...So spoke the influential and moderate Greensboro Daily News in the North Carolina city where the initial impetus for the present Negro student movement in the South began February 1. A traveler through the region today is struck by the accuracy of this assessment...

...Bernard Lee, expelled from Alabama State College for Negroes for taking part in a sit-in, says, "My grandfather had only prayer to help him...

...They looked at each other...

...That's why we can't get anywhere today...

...One young Negro summarized the issue when he said, "We're living in a jet age and we're tired of moving at an ox-cart pace...

...It will be ironic indeed if the region which has the highest rate and reputation for violence—due partly to the frustrations and aggressions of an unequally treated minority— should develop a significant non-violent approach to its major problem...

...College students in Nashville drew up a code of conduct to govern their sit-ins: "Don't strike back or curse if abused...

...Perhaps they are a portent of things to come...

...Both have written widely of their native South...

...Don't laugh out...

...May God bless each of you...

...But many of the students don't care about this...

...They want their rights and they want them now, and going to jail is no longer a disgrace but a badge of honor...

...Hats and coats were ruined...

...You see, what we call the old Negro always had to comply with everything in the South because of his economic status...

...Perhaps white people heretofore have hardly realized that certain of these doors were closed to Negroes...

...some forty-five in Tallahassee...

...In the new movement, lawyers are conspicuously less prominent than ministers...

...He was one of the first Negroes admitted to Vanderbilt University's Divinity School and became the hero of Nashville's students when he was expelled from Vanderbilt for his part in student demonstrations...

...When the hamburger is finally served, there will remain other closed doors...

...We have to work for something larger: reconciliation...

...A white minister present at negotiations between store executives and student protesters in one large city, said, "There was a poignant moment at that meeting...

...We don't serve colored here...

...Later, Blair gave this account of his conversation with the waitress: Blair: "I'd like a cup of coffee, please...

...And if you mean, are the young people impatient with me, the answer is yes...

...It gives one pause...

...They budge and shove, humiliate and intimidate each other, testing the strength of their endurance for future ordeals...

...As any crumb of bread strengthens a starving man so that he may seek the whole loaf, so any fragment of democracy increases a man's hunger for total participation...

...Yet one of the most frequent comments volunteered by white Southerners is, "Communication between the races has broken down...

...The idea's moral force—that colored men no longer will tolerate being served at nine counters and rejected at the tenth—cannot be denied...

...The outcry of white citizens in these places has revealed their basic lack of understanding of the issues and impulses involved: "Why do they do this to us...

...Sure we've been influenced by outsiders," a Florida student said not long ago, "outsiders like Thoreau and Gandhi...

...about sixty-five in Memphis...

...Ezell Blair, Jr., one of the Negroes in the initial Greensboro sit-in, told a reporter, "As new Negroes, we can speak up loudly now and without fear of economic reprisals...

...We're being tried in groups of fifty," one of them reported a few weeks later, "and one of the state lawyers told us, 'We'll give you boys a fair trial before we find you guilty.' " The sometimes difficult distinction between enforcement of law and suppression of protest is a matter of mounting concern to thoughtful Southerners...

...White Southern leadership must realize that the whirlwinds of change blowing across Africa today are generated by those same impulses that stir the lesser winds of change in our own country...

...One significant thing the Negro students have kept throughout their difficulties is a sense of humor...

...They understood Marvin's "disturbance...

...Maybe they scare some of the white people who would like to speak up for us," one young Negro said...

...This is not for you...

...Physical lynching, for instance, has been almost totally abolished...

...One fellow's ear began to bleed, but he stood there and took it...

...It will do the South no good to bury its head in the sand and hope the trouble will go away...

...And any American who is weary of what sometimes seems to be an obsessive national preoccupation with inanimate objects— the spread of chromium tail fins, the ¦thrust of a missile—will find inspiration in discovering throughout the South a people whose obsession has become the spread of democracy, the thrust of an idea...

...From the depths of bondage Negro slaves gave America the spirituals...

...Blair: "What do you mean...

...And one of them, a young white woman, replies, "If we'd only look in our own hearts we'd know...

...It is not an easy adjustment to make because one of the things the white Southerner has always felt he understood most and praised loudest was the Negro's patience...

...John Mack spoke of this sudden shift in leadership...

...We are stressing morals, not money...

...Today both the veneer and the silence are broken, shattered by the impatience of a generation which has come to high school and college age during the six years of hope engendered by the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation...

...Don't block entrances to the stores and aisles...

...Some of their dresses and shirts were torn...

...One example is the town of Orangeburg, South Carolina...

...Remember love and non-violence...

...Against the dignity and determination of people who can confront suffering without flinching, the paucity of imagination and courage in the methods of some of their white opposition stands stripped and barren...

...Since the founding of the colonies we have tried to escape this issue...

...Chief among the myths being rapidly dispelled is that of the contented Negro...

...In a full page advertisement in The Atlanta Constitution, six students from colleges in that city set forth some of the areas of inequality which would have to be changed before "it would all end": in education, jobs, housing, voting, hospitals, movies and restaurants, and law enforcement...

...Even more impressive than this code has been the system of workshops conducted for some of the students who plan sit-in demonstrations...

...We cannot hate...

...The religious motivation and implementation of this new movement lend it force and unity—and passion...

...We have been eduoated until we cannot adjust to the Southern way of life...

...One student in Georgia said, "We may have been apathetic about many things but not about this...

...They spit in each other's face...

...The deeper meaning of the 'sit-in' demonstrations is to show that segregation cannot be maintained in the South short of continuous coercion and the intolerable social order which would result...

...What of the threat of imprisonment...

...The theme of several of these workshops has been "the redemptive power of unmerited suffering...

...This initial episode was, in many ways, a microcosm of things to come —the adamant attitude of many whites, the angry fearfulness of some Negroes, confronted with change— and a refutation of future accusations that the demonstrations were initiated by "outsiders" and were a passing fad...

...Seen in this context, it was inevitable that the student protests should have started and reached greatest momentum in states like North Carolina and cities such as Nashville, where race relations are better than average...

...There are many friends, both black and white, who wonder if the complex understanding and stern self-control required by non-violence can be maintained by the students who have thus far met the challenge stoutly...

...The new young Negro knows the meaning of a desegregated army...

...Despite the fact that many white-people insist the demonstrations are fostered by a few ringleaders in Negro colleges, it appears more certain every day that "a whole generation" has decided segregation must go...

...It has been said that the South gave the Negro his greatest weapon— Christianity—and he's using it for all it's worth...

...You're dumb...

...In every Jim Crow state and town...

...We've known all along what they were thinking—now they're learning what we think...

...He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored...

...Bear your cross and wear your crown, Sit down Chillun, sit down...

...Waitress: "Well, you won't get any service here...

...And here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of White boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern states in the last war fought by gende-men...

...On March 15, 388 students were arrested there during a peaceful march from two Negro colleges—one state-supported, the other a Methodist institution—to the downtown area, about eight blocks away, where they intended to sing America and offer a public prayer for equal rights...

...He admits progress...

...now their descendants are singing those same songs with a faith strengthened by self-confidence, with a sorrow more universal than personal and not unrelieved by joyous boldness...

...We had seen the Georgia governor's opinion that the Atlanta students' straightforward ad was a left-wing statement that 'did not read like it was written in this country,'" one of their adult leaders said, "but we had expected better of Truman...

...It is the lunch counter protests...

...A North Carolina Negro student answers: "Most whites think communications have broken down just because they're getting a new message...

...You know you are supposed to eat at the other end...

...For instance, Rodney Powell, a perceptive student at Nashville's Fisk University, asked other Southern student leaders recently, "How can the ruffian fringes in both races be held to the purposes and methods of non-violence...

...The students are unskilled in negotiating, they're often unsophisticated in their handling of the local situations, but they have a power that's wonderful—and terrifying...

...This is a public place, isn't it...

...You just finished serving me at a counter only two feet from here...

...It's not Karl Marx and Khrushchev inspiring these students, but Jim Crow and Jesus Christ...

...Sit straight and always face the counter...

...The most outstanding feature of this student protest has been its effectiveness as a technique of communication...

...Its first verse: "Sit down Chillun—sit down...

...f Len Holt, energetic field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality, (CORE): "We've come to the issue of legalism versus moralism...

...The movement also seems to be responsible, perhaps because it has been generated by a new sense of purpose in life...

...They were sentenced to sixty days...

...The Reverend B. L. Robinson, of Petersburg, Virginia, says, "Many Southern whites have honestly believed we are satisfied with our situation, but general discontent and a desire for self-improvement have lain for years beneath a veneer of friendliness and happiness...

...Where will it all end...

...In a strange but effective training, young Negro men and women unlearn all the manners customary in civilized society...

...Impatience is one of the new forces to which both the older white and Negro leadership of the South must now adjust...

...As we see the spectacle of South Africa torn in revolution by racial conflict, isolated from the rest of the civilized world by its system of apartheid, perhaps it would be well, in this time, if the white supremacist South returned to some spirituals...

...There was a period from the early Thirties to the late Fifties when almost all the emphasis was on getting test cases, then going to the Supreme Court...

...In short, we might say, 'Lawyers stand aside—freedom ahead!' " Few of the leaders are as dogmatic as this, but most would agree with Nashville's Reverend C. T. Vivian: "We want to speak to the moral is-su*e, not to the old cold legal concept...

...In Marshall, Texas, during sit-in demonstrations, attack-trained German shepherd dogs were brought into town...

...The white people can go on pretending if they choose to do so, can be 'tough' or not as they please...

...They have sung it in prison...

...Their book, Neither Black Nor White, recently received a Sidney Hillman Award for unusual excellence.—The Editors...

...Such questions have undoubtedly led to the minute planning and the groomed dress which have characterized the sit-ins...

...In Virginia a more recent lyric has combined both the old qualities of the spiritual and the new message of non-violence...

...It' will all end when segregation and injustice and hypocrisy have ended...

...But the lynching of personhood remains, the stripping of individualism...

...It was ten o'clock that night before the Negro community could raise sufficient bail to get the students back to their campuses, where at least forty were treated for injuries and exposure in the near-freezing drizzle of rain...

...Even the city attorney of Montgomery, Alabama, who believes that "agitators" have stirred up this "uprising," has publicly stated, "Some say Communists are behind the whole thing...

...So the demonstrations have spread and varied according to localities, but they are indicating, in the words of the Southern Regional Council, that "the South is in a time of change, the terms of which cannot be dictated by white Southerners...

...We've taken a half-dozen of them into the schools, we've integrated some of our city facilities, we're doing so much better than many places...

...Atlanta, eighty arrests...

...Tear gas was thrown into their midst...

...Approximately 1,500 arrests, most of them Negro students, have been made since that February day...

...One or two of those in front were arrested then and the police chief said, 'Get those niggers.' The fire hoses were turned on...

...Old words spoken in the trite spring valedictory addresses at a thousand schools and colleges this spring suddenly have been dramatized in salutatory address to an astounded South...

...Step forward.' and twelve hundred students stepped forward...

...This sense of purpose and responsibility might surprise those who call the sit-ins only a passing fad...

...Then the arrests began, so many that only a parking lot converted into a temporary stockade could hold all the prisoners...

...Our country has not really faced this, ever...

...White students from various colleges, North and South, have joined in the protest demonstrations...

...Racism is not a legal or sociological issue," Lawson says, "but a moral one...

...Even some of us were surprised by the real feeling that surged up once these demonstrations had begun...

...The effectiveness of the message put over by their appearance was attested by an editorial in the Richmond News Leader, certainly no proponent of integration: "Many a Virginian must have felt a tinge of wry regret at the state of things as they are, in reading of Saturday's 'sitdowns' by Negro students in Richmond stores...

...Show yourself courteous and friendly at all times...

...I couldn't stand it for a white man to strike me," one student confesses, and the workshop leader advises him to stay home and participate in the cause in some other way...

...npHERE is one thing stronger than -l all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come.' An idea whose time has come is sweeping the South today...

...Blair said the waitress left then and went to the other end of the counter...

...It will do no good to blame the newspapers for telling what happens...

...That's not the level at which most of us live...

...If we're not dealing with leaders we can somewhat control,' they seemed to say, 'with whom are we dealing?' " Despite the fact that a new young leadership is exerting itself, the movement up to now has been to all appearances completely democratic...

...We cannot even be just for integration...

...One man who is pushing that use is thirty-one-year-old Reverend James Lawson, a student of Gandhi's passive resistance, who lived in India from 1953 to 1956...

...This hymn is not often heard in white Southern gatherings—but now the music swells out in a mighty chorus and spills into the darkness outside...

...There is a feeling of subdued, realistic glory here...

...I have prayer and education...

...From Greensboro to Chattanooga, to Florida, a new young Negro leadership is asserting itself...

...Orangeburg was the site of the most massive arrests, but numerous other Southern cities have followed the same reaction: Nashville, with some 150 arrests in lunch counter and picketing conflicts where Negroes were spat upon, hit, and had cigarette butts stuffed down the backs of their shirt collars...

...There is every indication that the young Negroes will keep pressing for an answer...

...If you do that, then I'll understand that this is a private concern...

...Students are close to the ideals—we are not dealing in expediencies...

...Implicit also in this first sit-in were the paradoxes on which the movement is based, of people determined to wear down violence with a stronger non-violence, sit down so they can stand tall, endure prison so they can be free...

...Perhaps some of the Negro parents, who were at first doubtful and fearful about their children's participation in these protests, now understand better than most Southerners what has "inspired" them...

...It will not affect the final outcome, which is that segregation in public places must go...

...On a soft spring night, a room full of young Negro students gathers to discuss the strategy of their sit-ins and poster-walks (picketing) and selective buying (boycotts...

...The new Negro, like the young white Southerner, is a more urbane person than his grandfather or father, less restrained by the old rural dependencies and fears...

...A Negro girl, a helper on the counter, confronted the four students: "You are stupid, ignorant...

...As one enlightened white business leader confessed, "Now we're dealing with the so-called 'new Negro.' I don't know, he may have been there all the time if we'd only stopped to see him —or listen to him...

...But our biggest influence has been inside—all those years of second-class citizenship stored up inside us...

...The most disturbing aspect of this movement," a white divinity school professor at a Southern university says, "is the fact that white leaders may so completely misread the situation that they refuse to deal with these students who are committed to passive resistance, and then they'll leave the way open for real extremists...

...Perhaps this development, and some of its portent, can be best indicated by several comments from widely separate sources...

...I have looked into this, but I can't say that Communists inspired it...

...But there is no evidence that arrests have discouraged any prospective demonstrators, and there is much evidence that they have encouraged a strong unity among Negroes...

...Ezell Blair and David Richmond had lived in Greensboro all their lives and experienced the lunch counter segregation "all along, with intentions of doing something about it eventually...

...The new Negro is educated...

...Then the students began to sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic and still moved forward...

...And this is significant because both white and Negro Southerners have remained closer to the formalities of religion than have residents of any other region...

...The man speaking for the store managers accused the Negroes of breaking their truce...

...It is not mere sentimentality that stirs inside a white listener as he hears the rich voices raised in a praise that is also a promise...

...These sit-downs can involve everyone, right now, and cost nothing...

...then adults rallied behind them in solid support...

...And it doesn't fit in with their pet myths...

...The meaning of the Montgomery feus hoycott experience, however, was not the Supreme Court decision that resulted, but the fact that 50,000 people walked, walked together...

...Before two and a half months had passed, every Southern state was caught up in a wave of passive resistance to segregation, a wave of such scope and force, extending from Charleston to Houston, from Louisville to Miami, embracing imprisonment and intimidation without faltering, that many observers have come to believe it is a movement of impressive passive persistence, as well...

...Blair: "I beg to disagree with you...

...Non-violence, he believes, convicts all of sin, but likewise is an appeal to the conscience of all...

...Martin Luther King, Jr., said in an Easter talk to some of the student leaders in Raleigh, North Carolina, "Token integration was all right when it was undertaken in good faith, but too often we found it smothered in the niceties of complexities and evasion of the law...

...some of the white Southerners ask dn anxious perplexity...

...It may not suffice even to fill up the jails...

...Roy Wilkins, NAACP executive secretary, summed up the thinking of these young Negroes—that old coercions fail in the face of new communications—when he said, not long ago, in Texas: "It doesn't matter how many police they bring in, or how many fines are levied, or Low many different charges are sworn to, or how many laws they pass overnight...

...When a whole generation of young people decides a thing is wrong, then it's dead...

...f Thurgood Marshall, in Charlotte, N.C.: "The young people are impatient with the slowness of court action in furthering equality...

...At 4:30 Monday afternoon, February 1, four freshmen attending the Negro Agricultural and Technical College at Greensboro, North Carolina, took seats at the lunch counter of the downtown Woolworth store...

...The method of non-violence is difficult and calls for a rugged discipline...

...And a Durham, N.C., banker, John H. Wheeler, agrees: "The greatest mistake Southerners can make is to interpret silence for disinterest in desegregation...

...We know that whenever anything happens in the Negro community, the white leaders call certain Negro leaders...

...Well, they called this time in Atlanta, after our demonstration, and the old leaders couldn't tell them...

...Legal cases can only be brought by one or two, take years, and cost a great deal of money...

...The flaming crosses of the Ku Klux Klan blaze across the South again...

...We've got to talk about this in down-to-earth moral terms...

...And when a white student told one Negro mother how much she admired her daughter who had just been sent to jail, the mother replied, "She's making history...

...What's going on down there?' they ask...

...The police chief asked who the leader was," one of the Negro boys related, "and twelve hundred students shouted, 'I am the leader.' " 'Well,' the police chief said, 'I am going to arrest the leader...

...Closely allied to this is the fact that he has had a slow but steady improvement of his economic situation...

...Spreading out from the lunch counter sit-ins, some of these attacks have already begun: on public libraries, public parks, a municipal museum, an art gallery...

...They're in high spirits," Steele reported...

...Those who have jeopardized their own chances for graduation from college now speak of themselves as "Graduates of the Richmond jails" or "Holders of the local Sheriff's degree —the third degree, that is...

...These crude efforts at intimidation have been no more successful than more sophisticated attempts to show that Communists are the real force inspiring the sit-ins...

...I believe the ones who ask really know the answer, but they can't bring themselves to accept it yet...

...Some of these words are: courage and Christianity, dignity and democracy, the big unsophisticated intangibles as fragile as dreams, as firm as granite...

...About two blocks from the campuses they were met by the police chief and the fire department...

...These young men and women have sung the same words in the face of angry mobs and policemen on horseback, in front of fire hoses and tear gas bombs and ill-concealed baseball bats...

...If you can't take it," an Alabama student says, "if you're so weak you've got to fight, find another movement...

...The firemen held their hoses ready to blast forth a stream of water...

...Waitress: "Negroes eat at the other end...

...When former President Harry S. Truman said, on April 18, "I think this is being engineered by the Communists," most Negroes were dismayed...

...Still they came...

...We made no truce,' they said...

...If Albert Brinson, a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta: "The Supreme Court can free us physically but only we can free ourselves mentally and spiritually...

...After arrests of students in Portsmouth, Virginia, a minister said that the adult Negroes had paid little heed to sit-downs until some of the young people were arrested by the police...

...The Southern Regional Council, a bi-racial fact-finding organization, has pointed out that where "the heavy-handed imposition of force to suppress and punish dissent" has been evident, "the issue now is no longer between citizens, but has become a struggle between Negro citizens and state power...

...It will do no good to assert that 'local custom' sufficient for fifty years ago or even twenty-five years ago must prevail forever...

...By turning to the church as well as the courtroom, the struggle for equality suddenly includes the whole Negro community and can also sensitize the white consciousness and conscience...

...If it isn't, then why don't you sell membership cards...

...Marvin Robinson says that when he was expelled from the state-supported Southern University in Louisiana, the administrators sent his parents tickets to come to Baton Rouge, explaining that he had become mentally disturbed...