In 1960, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins galvanized young people all over the South. The brave actions, and eventual success, of the non-violent protests inspired students to protest segregated facilities in other cities.
In March, students at Southern University in Baton Rouge organized. In April, the newly-formed Consumers League of Greater New Orleans began a boycott of the largely white-owned Dryades Street shopping district, where African Americans spent their money but couldn’t work.
Out of the Dryades boycott a small group evolved which would become the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Among those young people was a graduate philosophy student named Sydney Langston Goldfinch.
Son of a Tennessee Baptist missionary working in Paraguay, Goldfinch found the racial segregation of the mid-century South absurd and offensive. He brought black friends to services at all-white churches uptown and to the segregated snack bar on the Tulane campus and, with CORE members Oretha Castle, Cecil Carter, Jr. and Rudolph Lombard, sat in at the segregated lunch counter of the McCrory’s store on Canal Street.
Though other CORE members had received more publicity for their sit-in the week before at the Canal St. Woolworths, the McCrory protesters’ case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, where their arrests and convictions were struck down.
The blow against Jim Crow came at a price. Castle lost her hospital job. Lombard, a student at Dillard, sat in jail for weeks. Goldfinch was hung in effigy on the Tulane campus and got so many death threats that he couldn't get life insurance.
The sit-ins of 1960 were far from the last time Goldfinch battled with convention. He became local chapter director of the ACLU and fought for prison reforms, women’s rights and gay rights. In the 1970s, he founded what became the city’s best-known and longest-lasting experiment in collective living, known simply as “The Commune” in a house on Marengo Street.
A psychotherapist specializing in individual therapy based largely on Transactional Analysis, he worked in private practice until retiring in 2010, all the while maintaining his passion for social justice . . . and making trouble.
A man of many, varied interests from politics to ham radio, he was a patient teacher, a stern mentor and a caring friend who loved little more than hearing a new joke.
Lanny passed away last week in New Orleans, following a long struggle with dementia and complications from diabetes. The notice from the Times-Picayune can be found Here. A celebration of his life and legacy will be held this afternoon at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church today from 2 to 4.
More on the McCrory’s case can be found in Jarvis DeBarry’s piece, "Maladjusted" people changed New Orleans and the world and in Clarence Mohr’s “Tulane: Emergence of a Modern University.” De Barry also has a rememberence of Lanny in yesterday’s paper: "Lanny Goldfinch fought for black people's rights--and paid for it.