Do I want my story to have a happy ending or a sad ending? As
I was completing The Sit-Ins: Protest and
Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era, I found myself, to my surprise, stuck
on this question.
Not the typical question the historian asks, right? If the
history ends happily, then go happy. If not, go sad. Of course academic
historians are serious folk, we write serious history, and sad is more serious
than happy, so we usually go sad. If things are looking bright, point out the
shadows. If things are looking dark, show just how serious (systemic,
structural, durable) the dark is.
I suppose we’re allowed a happy-ending pass if we focus on
groups who are working against immeasurable odds and resisting oppressive
circumstances. But here too, even as we praise remarkable accomplishments, we
must then rein in that optimism by ensuring the reader’s attention never strays
far from the oppressive forces that remain, of setbacks down the road, of other
groups that remain left behind.
Here’s the problem: I’m a happy guy. My glass is half full.
I tend to be more curious about why good things happen than why bad things
happen. This surely helps explain why I first became fascinated with the 1960
lunch counter sit-in movement, a moment in history that even the most
pessimistic of historians would recognize as a remarkable achievement.
But, still, as I finished writing The Sit-Ins, I was stuck. Did I want to close the book by
emphasizing what was achieved by this protest movement and the ensuing national
debate over racial discrimination in public life? Or did I want to emphasize
what the sit-ins failed to achieve? Was this to be a story of victory or noble
defeat?
I went with a victory. I wanted to write a book that could
not just explain but also inspire. Plus, historians are trained to listen
carefully to the words of those whose lives they describe, and the students who
sat in protests at lunch counters in the spring of 1960 talked all the time
(during and afterwards) about the movement’s victories.
It is important to note that I had a choice here. And the
reason I had a choice is because there are so many viable options for measuring
victory. This point holds whether we impose our own definition of victory or
whether we locate a definition of victory held by the historical actors
themselves.
The most obvious measure of victory for the sit-in movement was
the desegregation of pubic accommodations, a process that culminated in the passage
and successful implementation of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But well
before that unmistakable achievement, the students themselves identified
countless other measures of success. Standing
(and sitting) alongside thousands of other college students as part of this
new, defiant movement was an achievement. Creating student-run
organizations that would strategize and coordinate sit-in protests might be
cited as a win for the movement. Students
saw going to jail as a valuable experience, both for the individual protester
and the larger movement. For the most dedicated of freedom fighters, even
enduring a beating was a victory. “This was an experience we needed,”
one participant explained about the violence against sit-in protesters. The Sit-Ins documents the many
opportunities the protesters found to declare victory.
But there is another side to this story, one that emphasizes
the conspicuous failures of the sit-in movement. Even as they strategized and
touted these attainable movement victories, activists and their allies also
defined their goals in a more idealistic, aspirational register. The sit-ins,
as Ella Baker famously proclaimed, “are concerned with something much bigger
than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke.” The true goal of the movement,
she said, was “to rid America of the scourge of racial segregation and
discrimination—not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.”
“We are willing to
go to jail, be ridiculed, spat upon and even suffer physical violence to obtain
First Class Citizenship,” one student group declared. For James Baldwin,
the sit-in movement was aimed at “nothing less than the liberation of the
entire country from its most crippling attitudes and habits.”
Measured by these standards, the sit-in movement might be
classified as, at best, a qualified success. Or perhaps, if we use Baldwin’s
standard as the benchmark, a noble failure.
In the midst of the battle over discrimination in public
accommodations, few questioned the importance of the issue they were fighting
over. The mere fact that white southerners fought so hard to protect their
“right” to discriminate confirmed the importance of the issue. Yet once the
battle was won, and Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the law of the
land, people on both sides began questioning the significance of the victory.
“Desegregation of public accommodations does not basically
alter the pattern of social life anywhere,” observed a Mississippi restaurant
operator. “That is why it has been accomplished as easily as it has.”
From a very different perspective, civil rights organizer
Bayard Rustin arrived at much the same conclusion. “[W]e must recognize that in
desegregating public accommodations, we affected institutions that are
relatively peripheral both to the American socio-economic order and to the
fundamental conditions of life of the Negro people,” he wrote in his famous 1965
essay, “From Protest to Politics.” The sit-ins had targeted “Jim Crow precisely
where it was most anachronistic.” They had toppled an “imposing but hollow
structure.”
Or, as the African American comedian Dick Gregory once
explained: “I sat in six months once at a Southern lunch counter. When they finally served me, they didn’t have
what I wanted.” It’s a funny line, with enough truth to cast a shadow over any
victory celebration.
What I settled on in the end was to acknowledge these voices
of caution and pessimism but to not let them be the final word. I sought to convey
the limitations of the changes the sit-in movement made possible, but to leave
the reader with something more hopeful. Not quite a happy ending, but something
closer to happy than sad.
Here are the closing paragraphs of The Sit-Ins:
The resolution of the issue first
given prominence by the students sitting at lunch counters in the winter of
1960 was one of the greatest achievements of the civil rights era. This book
is, in part, an effort to celebrate the sit- in movement and the legal battles
over discrimination in public accommodations that the movement sparked. It is
an effort to draw attention to this triumphant moment in our ongoing struggle
for racial justice, to better understand why this campaign for social and legal
change worked, when so many others did not.
Other battlefronts in the African
American freedom struggle proved far more difficult to uproot than racial
exclusion in public accommodations. The powerful synergy between social protest
and legal change that made the campaign against racial discrimination in public
accommodations so powerful and consequential was hard to replicate in other
areas. The struggle to implement Brown
dragged out for decades, and we still face pervasive segregation in our
schools. Disparities of wealth and income across racial lines persist, a
particularly stubborn reminder of the continuing effects of slavery and Jim
Crow. Racial disparities in our criminal justice system—from the stunning
overrepresentation of racial minorities in our bloated prison populations to
racially discriminatory police practices—remain one of the most significant
challenges we face as a nation.
Our challenge is to find new ways
combine social protest and legal claims to disrupt those practices and policies
that perpetuate old inequalities and create new ones. The lunch counter sit- in
movement shows that it can be done.
