Rev. Frederick Battle is all too familiar with civil disobedience and what spurs people to fight power with peaceful assembly. The mild-mannered minister was arrested 51 years ago in Greensboro, N.C., at a sit-in at Woolworth's department store.
At the time, he was a Chapel Hill school board member. But that didn't stop area restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses from refusing him and other African Americans admission and service. Battle and a few others took part in a small sit-in at Woolworth's one day, and the protest quickly gained significant support from students and a few faculty members at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, with increasing numbers of protests eliciting arrests throughout that day and the days to come.
According to a 2001 oral-history interview about the historic sit-ins that Battle took part in, "[W]e emptied the university. All the students went to jail. And for a week, A&T couldn't hold no classes, because they had no students. All the students was in jail. So they filled the jails, they had rest homes – they filled any kind of vacant building they had."
The actions that he and and the A&T State University students took in the early 1960s were pivotal in the civil-rights movement and the history of our state and our nation. Within two years of those 1962 arrests, Battle recalls, Woolworth's began serving African American patrons. Movie theaters began to allow African American patrons into the theaters but still forced them to sit in the balconies for quite some time.
Now Battle finds himself in a surreal Woolworth's redux. Although a Monday hearing at the Wake County District Court allowed him inside the General Assembly and Legislative Office buildings themselves for an afternoon meeting, he is still (under terms of his release from county jail) prohibited from taking part in any protests or civil-disobedience actions inside the buildings. In fact, except for scheduled meetings for which he must be escorted to and from the meetings rooms by legislative staff, Battle is not permitted inside the buildings at all until his criminal trespass and related charges have been fully adjudicated in court.
Those upcoming hearings on his actual arrest on charges of refusal to disperse when requested, criminal trespass after refusal to disperse, and "violating General Assembly rules" (which prohibit making "disruptive" noise and holding signs inside the buildings) will determine whether Battle will ever be allowed inside the buildings again. These are much the same charges under which Battle was arrested in 1962.
In the meantime, former Moral Monday arrestees are permitted on the grounds of the Halifax Mall, a patch of ground in between the General Assembly, Legislative Office Building, and several other state offices. And that's where Rev. Battle was for the 10th wave of Moral Mondays in North Carolina.
We in the Tar Heel State have embraced the historic success of civil disobedience to close the floodgates on a fierce river of repression. A newly elected Republican/Tea Party supermajority in the legislature and gubernatorial control by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Americans for Prosperity/American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) leader-turned-state-budget-director Art Pope have made North Carolina a battleground state for civil rights once again.
"What scares me about today," said Rev. Battle on July 8, "is that I see similarities that we are going back to those days, back to the '60s."
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