The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Half a century later, we have learned to live with many forms of weaponized irony, although, of course, new ones spring up all the time. One thinks of the “gaunt, bespectacled Negro man with white hair” whom Kinkead observed shouting encouragement to a column of protesters. “Here come the kids again!” he cried, and they are coming still.

  Katharine T. Kinkead

  APRIL 15, 1961 (DESEGREGATING DURHAM)

  A NEGRO FRIEND OF mine remarked to me a few weeks ago that whether America is ultimately able to adjust its culture so as to provide equality for its colored citizens will depend mostly on the nation’s Negro young people. “If you’re white, it’s easy to avoid the problem altogether, while if you’re colored and past twenty-five, you’re well along the road to accommodating yourself to second-class citizenship,” he said. “But these young people today, sitting in at lunch counters and kneeling in at churches, are different from my generation. They aren’t afraid and they aren’t bitter. They know what they want and they’re determined to get it.”

  I asked him whether he thought that, if I made a trip to a Southern city, there was a way I could meet some of these youths who, in the year since four boys from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina had almost diffidently taken seats at a “White Only” lunch counter in Greensboro, not only had forced the country to reexamine the judicial concept of integration “with all deliberate speed” but had aroused some of the supposedly “silent generation” of their white contemporaries to join their demonstrations. When I had convinced my friend, who had tended to regard me as a complacent white Northerner, that I was serious about wanting to visit one of the groups that had mounted this sustained and remarkably peaceable offensive, he promised he would inquire for me among acquaintances in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congress of Racial Equality, which have been providing the young Negroes with organizational and legal help.

  A week later, he phoned to say that if I could take a plane to Durham, North Carolina, the next afternoon, a local Negro attorney named Floyd B. McKissick, who was active in the N.A.A.C.P. and had been giving guidance and legal aid to local sit-in demonstrators, would meet me at the airport there and put me in touch with a group that was on the verge of starting a new sort of protest action. I agreed to this plan. My friend and I were both pleased—although for different reasons—that it was to be Durham I would visit. He had told me, “The kids there were the first to take up lunch-counter sitting-in after the start at Greensboro. In fact, the whole sit-in movement caught fire from Durham a week or so later.” My own pleasure at going to Durham stemmed more from selfish awareness of my age. North Carolina, I knew, was more liberal in its attitude toward Negroes than the Deep South, having started voluntary integration of its schools in 1957; I felt that in a demonstration there a middle-aged woman would be considerably safer than in, say, Alabama or Mississippi.

  · · ·

  Durham, which likes to be known as the Friendly City, is four hundred miles south of Washington in the north-central section of North Carolina. A guidebook told me that it is a city of about eighty thousand, the second-largest manufacturing center in the state, the home of furniture and textile firms, as well as of both the American Tobacco and the Liggett & Myers companies, which together make 19 percent of the cigarettes smoked in the United States. In Durham also are the seventy-five-hundred-acre campus and ornate Gothic buildings of Duke University, which at present has no Negroes in its student body of six thousand, and the fifteen-acre campus of North Carolina College, a four-year Negro liberal-arts institution with sixteen hundred students. Ten miles to the south, in Chapel Hill, is the University of North Carolina (eight thousand five hundred students, thirty-three of them Negroes); fifty-five miles to the west, in Greensboro, are Bennett College, for Negro women, and the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, a coeducational Negro state institution; and thirty miles to the south, in Raleigh, is the North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering, which has a largely white student body with a very few Negroes.

  When I reached the Durham airport, which lies south of the town in a wide stretch of sandy soil and pines, there, waiting for me in the wind and bright cold sunshine, was Mr. McKissick, a round-faced, erect, keen-eyed man in his late thirties. Beside him stood three youths, all with thin mustaches and all wearing trim topcoats, scarves, and narrow-brimmed Rex Harrison hats. McKissick introduced them—John Edwards, nineteen years old, a student at Durham Business College, which is a one-year private Negro school, and president of an N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council group called the Crusaders; Claude Daniels, also nineteen, also a student at the business college, and also a Crusader; and Bruce Baines, eighteen, a senior at the all-Negro Hillside High School and treasurer of the Crusader group. With awkward, elaborate courtesy, the boys took my bags and, after practically dusting off the front seat of McKissick’s car for me, handed me into the vehicle, then themselves got into the back.

  As we rode toward Durham, through a countryside of small tobacco farms, the boys’ conversation slowly expanded from the “No, Ma’am”s and “Yes, Ma’am”s of which it had at first been solely composed. They told me that although Durham had been the fourth town in the state to desegregate its schools, it had not done so until September, 1959. “If you call desegregation having eight Negroes in with fifteen hundred whites in the junior and senior high schools. We call it just one bean in a basket,” said John, a long-lipped boy with bright eyes, who often interspersed his rapidly spoken remarks with drolleries in a heavy Southern accent, to the delight of both himself and his listeners. He went on to tell me that McKissick’s next-to-youngest daughter was one of the integrated students at the junior high school, and that an older sister of hers, now in college, had been admitted to the high school. Local newspaper stories that I subsequently looked up described the integration of the high school as “uneventful”; it had come about by the decision of the school board, acting on what the press called “the overwhelming volume of 225 Negro reassignment requests”—the largest number of such requests ever sent in by Negroes in a Southern community. Accompanying one newspaper account was a photograph of McKissick’s daughter walking into school escorted by her mother and father, past some jeering white students. The lawn was strewn with leaflets that the newspaper said contained such exhortations as “Remember Little Rock. The people there at least had the guts to fight. Does Durham have less Courage?” The source of the leaflets was not identified, but opposing the enlightened influence of the many higher educational institutions about Durham, I later learned, is an inflammatory weekly entitled the Public Appeal, which specializes in long outpourings by Gerald L. K. Smith, among others.

  · · ·

  I asked the boys to tell me about the Crusaders, and Claude, a tall, handsome youth with sharply cut features, large and somewhat mournful eyes, and an antique, daguerreotype kind of dignity in his manner, told me that the organization had been established at Hillside High about four years ago and now also included groups in Bull City Barber College and De Shazer’s Beauty College, as well as in the Durham Business College. “Besides the Crusaders, the movement’s got men and women students in the N.A.A.C.P. group at North Carolina College, and some Duke students,” he said. “There’s even a white Durham High School girl in it—she made all our picket signs. All told, there’s about a thousand of us in the movement.” (All of the organized local activity for desegregation was, I discovered, usually lumped under the heading of “the movement”—or more formally, in the printed literature, the Protest Movement.)

  “Last August, our big chain-store lunch counters—Kress’s, Woolworth’s, and Walgreen’s—were officially desegregated,” said John. “And every few weeks two or three of us keep testing around, dropping into other lunch counters to see if they’ll serve us. There are over half a dozen places where we can eat now in the main downtown business district. Before that, if you had a job downtown and didn’t want to go way back
over the tracks to the Negro section, the only warm food you could buy was hot dogs at a couple of places that’d let you stand up and eat them. You get awful sick of hot dogs. A few other places would serve you sandwiches wrapped up but wouldn’t let you eat them there.” I asked the boys if, in addition to lunch counters, any white restaurants with table service had been desegregated. “Oh, no,” they said, looking at me in astonishment.

  When I asked what the task of getting the lunch counters integrated had been like, the boys were silent for a moment. Then Bruce—who, in spite of his hat and his mustache, looked absurdly young—spoke up. “We started sitting in and picketing on February 8, 1960, and except for Sundays and a few times when the stores closed, we didn’t miss a day until six months later, when the counters were desegregated.”

  “How many days did you fellows actually sit in?” McKissick asked.

  After some figuring, the boys said that in their case the average was probably fifteen days or so, although much additional time had, of course, been spent picketing.

  “Also, you might say they had some casualties,” McKissick told me. “These young fellows are known among the Crusaders as the Jailbirds. They’ve each been arrested at least once. Bruce is under a thirty-day sentence to work on the roads—suspended on condition of two years of good behavior—for assaulting a white man.”

  “There was a lot of pushing one day we were sitting in, and this big man fell off his stool and yelled for the police,” explained Bruce. “I was lucky I only got a month.”

  “John and Claude are out on bail on a trespass charge,” said McKissick. “During two days in May, we had two mass arrests, and eighty kids were indicted. Seven of them were convicted and given both fines and jail sentences. We’ve consolidated the seven cases and appealed to the state Supreme Court. What happens to them will decide what happens to the seventy-three others. You’ve been arrested two other times, haven’t you, John?”

  “They didn’t amount to much,” said John. “They were squashed in court.”

  “Douglas Thompson, who was killed last summer in a car accident, he’s got on his gravestone that he was a Crusader. He was arrested, too,” said Claude.

  · · ·

  I now inquired about the new protest the group was planning. In unison, the youths opened their topcoats to show small white tags bearing the legend, in red, “I do not attend segregated movies. DO YOU?”

  “At four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, we start picketing the theatres,” John said. For a long while, he continued, the younger Negroes had been restive about theatre segregation. The city has five motion-picture houses, I was told. Two admit only whites. A third is run by a Negro in a slum section of town, and is out of bounds for college students. “You wouldn’t want to take a young lady there, and she couldn’t go there alone,” Claude said. “It usually books only second- or third-rate shows, anyway.” The two other theatres admit Negroes, via separate ticket booths and entrances, to what John called their “buzzards’ roosts,” one a second balcony, the other a third balcony. “That third balcony is at the Carolina,” said John. “It’s a tall building, and the balcony is over six stair flights up. Even if your eyes are good enough to see the movie, it’s likely you’re too tired when you get up there to enjoy it. And old folks can’t make it at all.” None of the boys had been to the movies for about four years. It was four years earlier that the idea of protesting the theatre situation had been conceived and the tags that the boys now wore had been printed. “Before we used the tags, we wanted to give the city a chance to do something,” John said. “So we wrote a letter to the city manager telling him how dissatisfied we were. But nothing ever happened. We were about to start against the theatres last year when the lunch-counter sit-in began.” In July, he went on, in negotiations with the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations—a nine-member biracial advisory group of merchants, professors, ministers, and civic leaders appointed by the mayor—the Negro students had agreed that if the lunch counters were desegregated, there would be no new demonstrations of any sort “until it was felt that reasonable adjustment to this move had been made by the community.”

  “The college students started the lunch-counter protest,” said McKissick, “but it was the Crusaders who put it over. The college kids had to slack off when they began using up their classroom cuts, and a lot of them were away during the summer.”

  “This time, we’re starting the demonstration, and we hope it’s going to spread all over the South,” Claude said. “The college students are studying for exams, so we’ve told them we’ll keep the lines going for two weeks by ourselves, till they can join us.”

  “The Carolina and the Center—the two segregated theatres—are the ones we’re going to picket,” John said. “We intend to keep it up until they get desegregated. Over at Chapel Hill, there’s no theatres admit Negroes. Porgy and Bess is showing there, and the students are picketing to let colored people see it.”

  “You’d think they’d let Negroes into Porgy and Bess, wouldn’t you, man?” Bruce put in.

  “The Chapel Hill manager says he’ll have an extra ten-o’clock showing, but we don’t want that kind of token arrangement,” said Claude.

  “Over near the coast, I hear there’s a theatre has three separate entrances—one for Negroes, one for whites, and one for Indians. That must be mighty confusing,” said John.

  “Like the old blind folks in an institution I hear tell about,” said Claude. “It’s got white people in one section and Negroes in another. People take them out together to visit other blind folks’ homes, and when they get there, they’re all supposed to right away segregate themselves.”…

  · · ·

  The next day, the temperature was down in the low twenties, and a bitter wind was fitfully swirling flakes of snow about. McKissick’s offices, where I had arranged to meet the boys after lunch, turned out to be a pleasant set of rooms up a flight of wooden stairs in one of a row of old buildings not far from my hotel. Scrubbed, combed, and pressed, John, Claude, Billy, and Bruce were waiting for me. Their scarves were arranged carefully around their necks and their anti-segregated-movie tags fluttered from their lapels. Except for their frequent consultation of note pads that they kept pulling out of their pockets, their behavior seemed calm and normal. With them were two white Duke students—Franklin Ingram, a blond, bespectacled Southerner majoring in sociology, and Ned Opton, a tall, dark-haired Yale graduate who was studying for a Ph.D. in psychology. After introducing them, Claude triumphantly held up a car key. “I have the use of a car for the day,” he said. “We have some errands to do before we go to St. Joseph’s Church, where we’ve asked people to meet about three, when we’ll get ready for our movie-theatre protest. If you’d like to come along, we can show you some more of the town. But please don’t expect modern transportation.” Leaving Ingram and Opton, who were to rejoin us at the church, we started off in a sedan that was several years old.

  “We wanted to begin our demonstration with a solemn march from St. Joseph’s to the City Hall, where we would recite a prayer before going to the theatres,” said Billy. “So we asked for an appointment with the assistant chief of police. He talked real nice. But he said he had to deny us a permit in the public interest. ‘We don’t want a race riot, and I know you don’t,’ he said. ‘We’re only trying to keep law and order. The police is neutral.’ ”

  “The police always nootral,” said John, winking.

  We were driving through residential streets lined with modest, nicely kept houses—low-roofed double dwellings of white clapboard, each in its own yard, where, in many instances, there stood magnolias or other ornamental trees. “We think this is the garden spot of Durham,” Claude said. “We all grew up here, within a few blocks of each other.” He pointed out a large red brick school with white pillars, which the boys had all attended, and farther along, in a newer section, we came to the Durham Business College, which is housed in a former grade-school building. We stopped at a white cottag
e with an old spinning wheel decorating its porch to pick up a well-dressed and exceedingly high-spirited lad named McKinley Cates.

  As we drove along, Claude asked John if he knew whether or not a certain girl would be at the church.

  “Now, man, don’t mix business and pleasure in the movement,” said John.

  Claude protested, “I just want to ask her something about school”—a remark the other boys found very amusing.

  “This afternoon is business,” said John sternly.

  At John’s house, we waited for some time while he collected some articles for the demonstration, did a couple of chores, and changed into a warmer sweater. Once, we saw him walk across his yard, looking preoccupied and carrying a load of kindling. As we waited, Billy and McKinley were talking quietly in the back seat.

  “Did you see that television show from Georgia last week?” asked Billy.

  “Pertainin’ to what?” said McKinley.

  “They had some Ku Klux Klanners on, and they told how they felt about colored people. You know, you could tell by their manner of speaking those guys were businessmen. They were important and educated.”

  “I can believe it, man,” said McKinley. “I can even believe one of them might be a policeman.”

  “It just don’t seem right for a bunch of adults, businessmen, to talk that way, McKinley,” said Billy.