Franklin McCain, one of the "Greensboro Four" who was part of one of the first organized Civil Rights lunch counter sit-ins, died today.
He was 73.
"The best feeling of my life," McCain said in a 2010 interview with The Associated Press, was "sitting on that dumb stool."
According to this AP story:
"I felt so relieved. I felt so at peace and so self-accepted at that very moment. Nothing has ever happened to me since then that topped that good feeling of being clean and fully accepted and feeling proud of me.
From
Wikipedia:
On February 1, 1960,at 4:30pm four students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down at the lunch counter inside the Woolworth store at 132 South Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina. The men, later known as the A&T Four or the Greensboro Four, went to Woolworth's Store, bought toothpaste and other products from a desegregated counter at the store with no problems, and then were refused service from the segregated lunch counter, at the same store. Following store policy, the lunch counter staff refused to serve the African American men at the "whites only" counter and the store's manager asked them to leave.
The four university freshmen – Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond – stayed until the store closed.
The next day, more than twenty African American students who had been recruited from other campus groups came to the store to join the sit-in. Students from Bennett College, a college for African American women in Greensboro, joined the protest. White customers heckled the black students, who read books and studied to keep busy. The lunch counter staff continued to refuse service.
Here, more than 50 years later, it's hard for me, a middle-aged white guy, to imagine the courage it took for those four men to sit at that lunch counter.
Knowing the hatred they would face. Knowing the violence they could face.
Would I have had that courage? Would you?
The Civil Rights movement was, of course, a long, drawn-out effort, encompassing millions of people over the span of many years. It was a movement that built upon itself, and grew, until the force of right overcame the forces not only of wrong, but of inertia.
But there were defining moments, and when four young black men sat at a white-only Woolworth lunch counter on a February day in 1960, they helped to start changing the United States into a better country.
RIP Mr. McCain.
10 p.m. 1/10/14: Click here for the terrific New York Times obituary.
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