I have to confess that I’m probably not my first choice for writing this kind of diary. First, I’m not that good of a diarist. Second, my personal experience of this topic is pretty superficial and removed from much direct knowledge, but I thought I would take a stab at it since no one else has diaried about today’s date in history.
On this date in 1960, four young black men from A&T University walked into the Woolworth’s on Elm Street In Greensboro, NC, and after doing a bit of shopping, they sat down at the all-white lunch counter and asked to be served. They were refused, so they stayed on their stools until the store closed. They came back the next day with a couple more students, and as the days went by, more and more people joined them. The tactic spread nationwide, and while the Woolworth’s in Greensboro eventually integrated it’s lunch counter, the result was not the same everywhere. But the struggle continued.
I wasn’t living in Greensboro, NC in 1960. I moved there in 1964 when I was 7 years old. My dad took a teaching position at UNC-G (Formerly the Women’s College in the UNC system.), so we packed up and moved from our white, rural western PA hometown to the large and diverse city.
As with lots of kids who’s parents haven’t fostered racist attitudes, I was at first pretty oblivious to race. As I grew older, I noticed that almost all of the service jobs were held by African Americans. The lunch ladies at my (white) elementary school, the janitors, etc. were all black. Heck, I had lower-middle-class friends who had live-in black maids.
And while I had a couple of black acquaintances, we lived in a mostly white part of town between UNC-G and Greensboro College. Most of the racial diversity I was exposed to involved hanging out with the Lumbee Indian kids who lived on the block.
As time passed, I became more and more aware of the institutionalized bigotry that existed all around me. It really hit home for lots of folks when our public schools were ordered to desegregate in the early 1970’s. Rich white kids were forced to take the bus to what was then the "black" high school. There, they found where all the old, worn out textbooks, AV equipment, etc that had been ‘discarded’ by the white high schools ended up. Broken furniture, run-down facilities... these things opened a lot of white eyes, and gradually improvements were made. And while many white folks may not have changed their prejudices, they did finally have to face the fruits of their actions.
Now, forty-eight years later, I find myself living in an almost exclusively white, rural area of the Upstate NY, where republican voters outnumber Democrats by more than two to one. In my town of approx. 2500, you could count the African Americans on one hand. But a truly remarkable thing is happening all around me.
Last November I lost a close election for a seat on our town board (I was eventually appointed to a seat on the board by the 4 sitting republicans, but that’s another story). The night after the election, the wife of a long-term republican incumbent called me to offer her condolences re: my having lost the election. During the course of the conversation, she told about how excited she was to be supporting Barack Obama. I was stunned. Not only was this woman enthusiastic about him, she had spent time in New Hampshire going door to door for him! This white, fairly well-off republican woman was so inspired by Obama that she traveled across two states to wear out her shoe leather for him.
Just the other day, I was talking to one of the county highway workers in the local super market. He told me how the members of the highway crew were all saying that they would support Obama. They weren’t too hot on Clinton, and the national repubs had totally turned them off. Understand that these guys are all white. All hard-core country boys. And they want Obama? Amazing.
So, I got to thinking. Here we are 48 years from the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in and were might be on the verge of electing a black man to the highest office in the land. 48 years is a long time in the lifetime of a single person, but as history rolls... not so much.
But here we are.
Amazing.