Beyond Home Plate by Long Michael G.;Long Michael G.;

Author:Long, Michael G.;Long, Michael G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press

In Defense of Student Sit-Ins

On March 19, 1960, former president Harry Truman made the following comment on the student sit-ins under way throughout the South: “If anybody came to my store and tried to stop business, I’d throw him out. The Negro should behave himself and show he’s a good citizen. Commonsense and goodwill can solve this whole thing.”1 Several days later, Truman reiterated his position after two officials of the Detroit NAACP had asked him about it. “I would do just what I said I would,” the former president added. “NAACP is an organization which has been working for goodwill and commonsense in this situation which we are facing today. When they do things that cause people, who have been friendly to them as I have been, to feel that they are doing the wrong thing, they are losing friends instead of making them.”2

Source: New York Post, March 25, 1960, 96.

FORMER PRESIDENT TRUMAN’S OUTBURST at the NAACP is a sad commentary on the man who, in 1948, gained the whole world’s respect for thrashing the Dixiecrats. That he should now choose to attack those who are so valiantly fighting bigotry, rather than the bigots themselves, is regrettable but insignificant. For Negro Americans are determined to obtain their full rights and human dignity no matter whose voice is raised against them.

If Truman really means that he would “throw out” any of the quiet, orderly, peaceful students for merely asking to be served at a public lunch counter, then I suggest he open an establishment and prepare to begin at once. It is not the students who are “stopping business” in these stores. The managements themselves have closed their counters, rather than choose to sell Negroes sandwiches as well as toothpaste.

In point of fact, Negroes in the South do not now have the opportunity of “showing” they are good citizens—as if any American should be required to prove the point to begin with to receive his “inalienable rights.” Barred from the basic right of a citizen—the vote—and hemmed in by restrictions on opportunities for education, jobs, housing, culture and every other activity, it is little short of amazing that Negroes have “behaved themselves” as well as they have. It is also ironic that Truman set up no such requirement before sending his “greetings” indiscriminately to millions of Negro Americans to fight and die for their country in World War II and Korea.

This corner can only point out that progress will not wait upon Harry Truman or anyone else. Our young people refuse to be contented with even Truman’s patronizing gradualism. And it is exceedingly pathetic to hear a former President declare he would resort to violence to oppose children peacefully asking to buy ice cream at a soda fountain. . . .

Truman later added that he “wouldn’t be surprised” to learn that the student sit-ins were “engineered by communists.”3 As a fierce defender of youths engaged in civil rights campaigns, Robinson replied to Truman’s allegation by depicting the former president as “senile.

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