INC NEWS - Civil rights history marked: today at 6PM at Roxboro & Dowd (Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

Civil rights history marked
By Matthew Milliken, Herald-Sun, 23 Jun 2008 

Royal Ice Cream's two-story brick building sat on the corner of North Roxboro and Dowd streets. Picture windows lined the facade. Inside was an attractive serving and eating area with comfortable tables and booths. The room was decorated in royal blue and red with yellow trim. 

Which isn't to mention Royal Ice Cream's biggest attraction: the ice cream itself. "I don't care where you went, the Royal Ice Cream was the best ice cream in town," Mary Elizabeth Clyburn Hooks said Sunday. 

Hooks ate the ice cream, but never in the dining room. Still, her attempt to do so earned her a spot in history for participating in what some call the first-ever sit-in at a racially segregated restaurant. 

The protest, which took place 51 years ago today, will be remembered at 6 p.m. inside nearby Union Baptist Church at an event that will feature the unveiling of a state highway history marker. The marker is just the fourth out of more than 1,500 official North Carolina roadside plaques to commemorate civil-rights history. 

The new sign will be permanently installed at North Roxboro and Dowd later this year after Union Baptist finishes a school on the site of the former ice cream parlor. 

The Royal Ice Cream action predated a more famous racial segregation protest by four college students at the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. That sit-in began on Feb. 1, 1960, lasted six months and is widely credited for helping to popularize the civil-rights movement nationwide. 

In 1957, though, Durham was seeing the early stirrings of the civil-rights struggle. Blacks had unsuccessfully sought to integrate seating for the Durham Bulls, who had just been assigned their first three black ballplayers. Soon after, Duke announced that a federal summer science institute would be attended by three black teachers in a temporary and involuntary breach of the university's segregationist policy. 

Asked about the Royal Ice Cream parlor, Hooks recalled: "It was in a good location. They were located in the middle of a colored section. But they had signs up on the doors. And they had [a] colored side. But the colored side, when you go over there, you couldn't sit down. You'd just get your stuff. And another thing -- it was dirty and dingy." 

The sit-in began at a meeting of an organization called ACT. Its leader was the 28-year-old Rev. Douglas Moore of Asbury Temple Methodist Church. Born in Hickory and educated at Howard University and Boston College -- where classmate Martin Luther King Jr. considered him too extreme -- Moore at about age 13 or 14 became radical about racial integration. 

"Or as I call it, bearing witness to the truth of Jesus Christ," Moore said last week from his home in Washington, D.C., where he is a former City Council member. 

According to Virginia Williams, she, Clyburn and their good friend Vivian Jones were leaving the YWCA, where Clyburn and Williams lived, when some men going into the building invited them to attend the May 1957 meeting of ACT. The group resolved to integrate a city's restaurant in June and chose Royal Ice Cream because of its location in a black neighborhood. 

"We didn't know any of these people," said Williams, a Durham resident who has spent decades working in food service at Duke and UNC. "We got invited to a meeting. And when we found out what it was, we joined it and went through with it because it was something we believed in." 

Speaking from her New Jersey home, Hooks recalls things differently, saying she knew Moore and his views on racial integration. She also knew two of the sit-in participants, Claude Glenn and Jesse Gray. 

One thing the two women had in common was their fathers' interests in racial equality. Hooks' father would frequently try to get his family served in Monroe restaurants, always without success. Williams' father would clandestinely attend meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People near their home in Seaboard. 

At least as significantly, Williams recalls seeing her father watch television news and sensing the tension in his face as the television carried news of racial injustice. 

"All of this I guess was inside of me," Williams said Friday. "So when I found out they were gonna sit in, it was a chance for me to -- now he couldn't do anything about it, but this was my chance." 

Accounts differ as to whether ACT assembled on June 23, 1957, at the YWCA or Moore's church. But after a meeting that afternoon, eight well-dressed young adults headed to the ice cream parlor and entered the back way. Only instead of waiting for their order there and then leaving, as black people were expected to do, the group pushed through a swinging door and sat down in the booths on the white side of the restaurant. 

While the protesters waited for service, the group picked out their orders. Hooks remembers wanting to get a banana split with three scoops of ice cream. 

It never came. At least one waiter asked the group to leave. Then the owner did. Police arrived around 7 p.m., at which point, Williams said, one protester headed out. The cops asked the group to leave, but they refused. Eventually the protesters were arrested. 

Moore, Clyburn, Williams, Jones, Glenn, Gray and Melvin Willis were tried and found guilty of trespassing in Recorder's Court the next day; each defendant was fined $10 plus court costs. 

Reactions to the groundbreaking Royal Ice Cream sit-in varied. Hooks' surrogate mother at the YWCA criticized her. 

The verdict was split in Williams' family. "Y'all did right to go in there and sit down and not get up," Williams recalls her father saying when she visited Seaboard. Williams' mother was unhappy, though, because word had gone around that Williams had been in jail as a result of the protest. 

The trespassing conviction -- the case was labeled Clyburn because Hooks' maiden name was first in alphabetical order among the seven defendants -- was appealed through the state courts, unsuccessfully each time, and referred to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Ultimately the NAACP paid the courts $433.25 on behalf of the so-called Royal Seven, who were represented by attorneys working for free. 

Royal Ice Cream remained segregated and was picketed by civil-rights protesters five years after the 1957 sit-in. 

The Royal Seven's protest has gained most of its fame in recent years. Publicity accelerated in October 2006 after a handful of parties unsuccessfully protested Union Baptist Church's demolition of the old Royal Ice Cream shop, which in latter days was a food establishment known as Charlie Dunham's. Last year, the event's 50th anniversary preceded a successful effort to persuade a state panel to issue a marker honoring the Royal Ice Cream sit-in. 

The marker says, "Segregation protest at an ice cream parlor on this site, June 23, 1957, led to court case testing dual racial facilities."