Dude, Where's My Black Studies Department? by Cecil Brown

Author:Cecil Brown [Brown, Cecil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-391-5
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

The A&T College Lunch Counter Sit-in

One of the most significant events in the history of Black Studies was the sit-in at Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960.

I remember vividly the Sunday that my Uncle Lofton and Aunt Amanda drove me to A&T College, a five-hour journey from Wilmington to Greensboro, to begin my freshman year. They were proud to see me off, mainly because they had never known anybody in our family to go to college. Aunt Amanda packed a lunch for me that included fried chicken. I admired her cooking and preferred her corn bread to store-bought white bread.

As I checked into my dormitory at Scott Hall, I could not imagine that I would be a part of history, that a few months later, in February 1960, I would participate in the first Black student sit-in.

The four students who led the sit-in—Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond—lived in my dormitory, and I got to know them all. For these young Black men, February 1, 1960, was a monumental day. It was the day they integrated the lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was a monumental day for me too, because I—along with hundreds of other A&T students—joined in the lunch boycott. Within weeks, Black students were sitting down in lunch counters across the country. White students didn’t want to be left out, so they formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other groups to participate.

In his essay “The White Race and Its Heroes” in Soul On Ice, Eldridge Cleaver says that young White people saw the evil ways of their parents and forefathers and decided to throw over that inglorious past and join in with Black people. “Its first dramatic manifestation [i.e. ‘a political conflict between the generations’] was within the ranks of the Negro people, when college students in the South, fed up with Uncle Tom’s hat-in-hand approach to revolution, threw off the yoke of the NAACP,” Cleaver writes. “When these students initiated the first sit-ins, their spirit spread like a raging fire across the nation, and the technique of non-violent direct action, constantly refined and honed into a sharp cutting tool, swiftly matured.”79

Cleaver was correct in identifying that student sit-ins spread rapidly from one college to another one. He goes on to claim that there was a conflict between the young students and their elders: “The older Negro ‘leaders,’ who are now all die-hard advocates of this tactic, scolded the students for sitting-in. The students rained down contempt upon their hoary heads.”

Although this makes a powerful image, for the most part it is not true. At A&T College, our teachers and the older generation generally applauded what we did. In fact, the faculty and the administration wanted the sit-ins to be successful.

Cleaver was one of the first visionaries to connect the Black sit-ins to world struggle. Black Studies, he claimed, linked up “the Negro revolution with national liberation movements around the world.… The ‘Negro leaders,’ and the whites who depended upon them to control their people, were outraged by the impudence of the students.

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