INC NEWS - First sit-in deserves state marker (columns & articles by Bob Ashley, Jim Wise & Ron Lanfried)

[John Schelp]

Something we can all support...

Column: First sit-in deserves recognition 
By Bob Ashley, Herald-Sun, 21 Oct 2007 
 
Decades ago, I regularly visited the Surry County
Courthouse in Dobson for my part-time job with The
Mount Airy Times. 

At least once a week, I'd stroll by a metal plaque at
the curb that commemorated "Stoneman's Raid." 

"On a raid through western North Carolina Gen.
Stoneman's U.S. cavalry passed through Dobson, April
2, 1865," the N.C. Highway Historical Marker
laconically noted. 

The 5,000 troops under Major General George Stoneman
are credited, according to the state's Web site on the
marker program, with stretching thin the Confederate
home guard and hastening the war's end. 

The raid was fairly obscure, but at least 18 other
markers scattered about the western part of the state
commemorate it. 

A group of Durham folks, spearheaded by R. Kelly
Bryant, thinks there ought to be at least one highway
historical marker commemorating the site here of one
of the earliest sit-ins in protest of segregated
facilities. The protest, on June 23, 1957, may well
have been the first civil rights sit-in in North
Carolina. 

The marker is all the more important since the old
ice-cream-parlor building was razed last year. 

Bryant first attempted to get a highway marker for the
site in 1999. He has been unsuccessful, but he'll soon
have another chance. 

Events may be shifting in his favor. 

The 50th anniversary this past summer of the Royal Ice
Cream sit-in has attracted a fair amount of attention.
Eddie Davis, a former Hillside history teacher and now
president of the N.C. Association of Educators, wrote
an op-ed piece for this newspaper in June rallying
support for the anniversary. 

He helped to organize a panel discussion last month at
the Durham County Library, and The Herald-Sun and
other media gave that event strong coverage. Jim Wise
at The News and Observer has taken up the cause, as he
had earlier while at this paper. Our editorial page
editor, Ron Landfried, wrote a column after the
library panel. 

And last Tuesday, Bryant talked about the sit-in at
Preservation Durham's "Lunch and Learn" event, and
made a pitch to support the historical marker drive. 

Michael Hill, research supervisor in the N.C. Office
of Archives and History, says the committee that
decides on the markers will hear an appeal Dec. 17 of
its rejection of the last application for a Royal Ice
Cream marker. 

Hill, who has worked with the marker program for 25
years, lives in Durham and has noted the recent
activity. "What I've seen happening in Durham is
broader recommendation given to this event," he said
last week. 

In the end, the committee makes its decision "based on
what they believe is the best course for the program
and what qualifies as statewide significance," he
said. 

I don't envy the committee's task. Over the years,
1,513 markers have been erected, with 10 or 12 a year
added recently. I'm sure an equal number of
possibilities are out there. 

But it would be reasonable to correct an apparent
imbalance. 

If you search the database for the marker program,
you'll find 238 markers refer to Civil War events,
some arguably marginal, such as this one in Manteo: 

"Confederate channel obstructions: Wood pilings placed
to stop Federal fleet in Croatan Sound, still visible
at low tide." 

Search for Civil Rights, and you'll find exactly two
markers (Hill says a relatively new one commemorating
a Martin Luther King appearance hasn't been coded with
the "civil rights" keyword yet). 

Granted, the Civil War looms large in North Carolina's
history. And many of the Civil War markers went up
during the excitement of the 1961-65 centennial
observances. 

"With the passage of time, we've seen considerably
more interest in 20th century history and aimed to
incorporate a broader variety of topics," Hill said. 

State Sen. Floyd McKissick, a Durham Democrat whose
family name is rich in civil rights history, stood to
support Bryant's campaign at the Preservation Durham
lunch. 

Speaking of the Royal Ice Cream sit-in, he said "we
need to make sure it's not just an asterisk on the
page, a footnote to history." 

Quite right. 

****

Sit-in made civil rights history
The incident at a Durham ice cream parlor was one of
the South's first but gets scant attention in accounts
of the era
By Jim Wise, News & Observer (Durham News), 23 June
2007

Fifty years ago this afternoon, seven people waited
for service in a Durham ice cream parlor.

Service didn't come. They were black. The room where
they sat was for whites only.

What did come was a request to leave, then an awkward
standoff with a perplexed waiter, then arrests,
trials, convictions for trespassing, appeals as far as
the U.S. Supreme Court, and fines of $25 each and
costs for committing one of the South's first sit-ins
for civil rights.

"I think about it often," said Virginia L. Williams,
70. She was one of the seven, and sometimes she rides
by the intersection of Roxboro and Dowd streets, where
Royal Ice Cream stood on June 23, 1957.

That was 2 1/2 years before a sit-in at a Woolworth's
lunch counter in Greensboro made national news and
inspired a wave of similar actions across the
segregated South. Yet, the Durham incident rates
passing mention at best in chronicles of the civil
rights movement.

Some people think it deserves better.

"It is history," said Charles Stanback, who was 14 at
the time. "I'm from Durham. I remember it very well."

Stanback is now project manager for the Bridge to
Success project of Union Baptist Church, which stands
across Dowd Street from the Royal Ice Cream site. The
church bought the site in 2004 and is building a
private school there: It had the Royal building razed
last October, but Stanback said plans are to
commemorate the sit-in there in some way.

Others have tried, without success, to get recognition
for what happened at Royal Ice Cream.

"I made several attempts to have a [state] historical
marker placed there," said R. Kelly Bryant Jr.,
retired N.C. Mutual Life Insurance manager and an
authority on Durham's black history. "And each time it
was turned down because, they claimed, it didn't have
enough significance."

A place in history

By 1957, Durham already had a place in civil rights
history. In 1932, Thomas Hocutt, a graduate of N.C.
College for Negroes (now N.C. Central University),
applied to the all-white University of North Carolina
dental school in the first legal challenge to
segregation in higher education. The "Durham
Manifesto," issued after a 1942 conference of black
leaders at N.C. College, demanded black voting rights
and equal opportunity for education and jobs. In 1953,
R.N. Harris became the first black elected to Durham's
City Council.

But 1957 was the year the budding movement hit Durham
full force: The Durham Bulls fielded their first black
players, and protesters attempted to integrate Durham
Athletic Park seating on opening night. Black
schoolteachers attended a summer institute at Duke
University. The Durham Ministerial Alliance passed a
resolution against racial segregation. The city's
tennis courts were integrated. Mayor E.J. "Mutt" Evans
created the town's first Committee on Human Relations.
And there was Royal Ice Cream.

Virginia Williams was not especially political in the
spring of 1957. Graduating from high school in 1955,
she moved to Durham from Northampton County, found a
food service job at Duke Medical Center and moved into
a YWCA on Umstead Street in Hayti. One Sunday
afternoon, she was invited into a meeting in the Y's
parlor. The group was all young black adults, none
students, Williams said. They were led by Douglas E.
Moore, a 29-year-old minister at Asbury Methodist
Church.

"The conversation in that meeting was basically geared
to testing one of the establishments in the city,"
Williams said. "A number of names were thrown out. The
reason we settled on Royal Ice Cream bar was, it was
centered in a black community," but black customers
had to use a back door and stand up for service.

'I wasn't afraid'

About 6 p.m. on a Sunday, Mary Clyburn, Claud Glenn,
Jesse Gray, Vivian Jones, Melvin Willis, Moore and
Williams left Asbury church, drove across town and sat
down. Williams said she was excited.

"I wasn't afraid. I might not have thought the thing
through, but I wasn't afraid."

Later, they said, there was a polite standoff, and the
police who came were courteous. Their story was in the
morning paper, but Williams said the repercussions she
expected at work never happened. Their case, they
hoped, would test the segregation law itself, but it
remained a matter of simple trespass. Two appeals were
unsuccessful, and a third, to the U.S. Supreme Court,
was denied.

"It started everybody to thinking what was right and
what was wrong in our society," Williams said.

Williams remained active in the movement, joining
protests at Durham's segregated Howard Johnson's
restaurant that went on for months in 1962 and '63.
She's still involved, "to a certain extent," she said,
and an active member of St. Joseph's African Methodist
Episcopal Church -- currently president of its
Satterfield-Davis Auxiliary, a dramatic group. She
worked at Duke for about 10 more years after '57, but
for the past "40-plus" she has commuted to Chapel
Hill, where she works in food service at the Granville
Towers student residence.

She still lives in Durham, though: "It's a town I can
get my hands on," she said. "I have a lot of friends
here."

Most of the others who sat in that day are dead now,
she said; Moore moved to Washington, stayed active,
and now owns Moore Energy Resources, a fuel brokerage,
and collects black American art. He could not be
reached for this article.

Royal Ice Cream eventually closed, and Charles
Dunham's Food Service took it over. The interior was
remodeled past recognition, and now the whole thing is
gone, but still not forgotten.

"We're going to get something nice on that corner,"
Charles Stanback said. "To let folks remember what was
there."

Civil rights issues were troubling America's waters in
June 1957, but the Royal Ice Cream sit-in and
resulting legal case made hardly a ripple where
Greensboro, almost three years later, made a splash.

"I think the major reason for the different impact of
the two sit-ins has to do with the context of the
times, and the local circumstances," said Duke
University historian William Chafe, author of
"Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North
Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom."

Replying to e-mail questions from The News & Observer,
Chafe said that in 1957 the Brown v. Board
school-desegregation case was just three years old.
"Some people still had hopes that the state and
federal government might live up to the [U.S. Supreme]
Court's ruling." By 1960, it was clear more action
would be required.

"Perhaps more important, the Durham black community
was divided, with many of the more established leaders
not being supportive of the sit-in," Chafe continued.
Also in Greensboro, the demonstrators were college
students whose support from N.C. A&T, Bennett College
and, before long, UNC's Women's College, grew
exponentially from one day to the next.

"Finally, this was 1960 and the ground was more ready
for this kind of event to trigger a far-reaching
movement," he wrote. 

****

Column: 50 years ago, Durham's 'Royal Seven' sat for
justice
By Ron Lanfried, Herald-Sun, 29 Sept 2007

>From a safe distance in time, it can be interesting to
play the historical "what if?" game. 

What if I had lived in 18th century America? Or
Germany in the 1930s? Would I have recognized the evil
and injustice that, from our perspective, seem obvious
now? Or would I have happily gone along with the
status quo? 

I was thinking about that two weekends ago at the
downtown Durham library, when a small crowd turned out
to reflect and remember the sit-in at Royal Ice Cream
50 summers before, on June 23, 1957. 

How would I have reacted had I lived in Durham back
then and heard about the seven black students who were
arrested for sitting in a whites-only booth at the
soda fountain at the corner of Roxboro and Dowd? 

This month, two members of the "The Royal Seven," as
they came to be known, came to the library to share
their memories -- Virginia Williams, who still lives
in Durham, and the organizer, the Rev. Douglas E.
Moore, who at the time was the pastor of the Asbury
Temple United Methodist Church, and went on to become
a City Council member in Washington, D.C. 

I know some readers get tired of hearing about racial
issues. They write letters occasionally to say so. Why
dredge those contentious days up again? Aren't we over
it yet? 

The simple answer is no. On the stage at the library
were these older folks who, in their younger days,
were arrested for simply sitting in a booth at an ice
cream shop. Why? Because of their race. Imagine that. 

They're not over it, and we shouldn't be either. We
need to remember what it was like, and how prejudice
can twist people in knots. 

Rev. Moore, the organizer, was a rabble rouser back
then. He still has the gift of being able to say out
loud what he believes to be true. 

In the old days, he said, just to tweak the system,
he'd drink out of the "whites only" water fountains.
"I'd say, 'Oh, this is good white water.' " 

Royal Ice Cream was chosen for the protest, Rev. Moore
recalled, because it was in the black community. He
thought the protesters might find sympathetic
surroundings there. 

"We selected Royal Ice Cream because it was surrounded
by black people. We thought we'd get support. No way.
We got the wrath of the community." 

Virginia Williams was excited that day, she
remembered. On the day of the protest, one member of
the group opened the door as planned, and the rest
hurried in and sat in the booths, where they weren't
supposed to be. They ordered ice cream and were
refused. A manager asked them to leave, but they
stayed right there. Eventually, police were summoned.
The officers were polite but firm, Williams said. 

"They brought eight officers, so each one of us had an
officer. One officer said, 'Leave now, and there will
be no charges.' But we wanted ice cream." 

They also wanted equality. Instead, the "Royal Seven"
got a ride to the police station and a court date.
They were found guilty by a white jury and fined $25
each. Their lawyers appealed the case all the way to
the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. 

The Royal Seven were pioneers. It was only three years
after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of
Education decision outlawed segregation in public
schools. But segregation was still very much alive. It
was two and a half years before a sit-in at
Woolworth's in Greensboro made history and set off a
flurry of similar protests, including Durham. 

What if I had lived in Durham then? Would I have
written a sympathetic column in the newspaper or
joined the protests? Or would I have been like many
white folks -- angry at the effrontery of these brash
Negroes? 

The Royal Seven don't have to ask themselves what they
would do. They know what they did. They sat down and
demanded decency and justice from a world that was
seriously challenged in those areas. 

But now, of course, times have changed. We've learned
from our mistakes, and we've banished evil and
injustice. We've gotten over it, haven't we? Or are we
still missing something? 

****