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Days of Hope and Courage
Reunion will celebrate historic local Civil Rights sit-ins
By Frye Gaillard
- Mecklenburg County,Public Library of Charlotte and Courtesy of Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room
- Sit-In protestors in Downtown Charlotte, 1960 (Robert Hunt, Joan Adams Siler, Ann Frazier Walker, and Virginia Lee)
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This was South Carolina, she said. The police would come and take him away, and nobody knew what would happen to him then.
A few years later at Johnson C. Smith, he was grateful for Mattie DeLaine's intervention, especially as he studied the theory of non-violence, the new cornerstone of the civil rights movement. Charles Jones talked about it all the time, telling the students who volunteered for the sit-ins, "We are going to sit at the lunch counter, and we are not going to move. We are not going to cooperate with segregation, but we are going to be on our best behavior. We are not going to talk back. We are not going to return any white people's blows. If you are uncomfortable with that, just remember we are outnumbered, outgunned, so we have to be disciplined and we have to be smart."
Early on the first morning of the protests, Jones put on "Sunday-go-to-meetin'" clothes, and went down to the administration building on the campus, a handsome, 19th century edifice constructed carefully out of handmade bricks. It was a symbol, he knew, of all the ancestors' hopes in the days just after emancipation, when the former slaves set out to build institutions -- churches, schools, even a few universities where they could aspire to the highest educational opportunities.
On that cold winter morning in 1960, Jones could feel a connection between the hopes and dreams of the ancestors' time and the new possibilities of the civil rights movement. He wondered if the other students felt it as well, but in a way he knew that it didn't really matter. The important thing was they were there in force -- maybe 200 strong, waiting to make the trek downtown. Some of them drove their personal cars, a few others walked, and most of them rode on the campus school bus, driven that day by B.B. DeLaine.
They sat in at the counters of a half-dozen Charlotte stores, and day after day they kept coming back. There were racial insults and scattered acts of violence, as young white toughs gathered periodically to spit or heckle or threaten further harm. DeLaine also remembered one policeman who elbowed a coed squarely in the face, knocking her to the ground. But the police most often seemed to be restrained, and so did many of the city's white leaders. And perhaps most importantly in the eyes of Charles Jones, there were committed reporters from the Charlotte Observer and some of the radio and television stations who seemed to be serious about telling the story.
Their dispatches were usually even-handed and fair, and they reported not only what the demonstrators did, but also their explanations about why. Jones himself quoted the Constitution and the Old Testament prophets, talking about equality and Christian brotherhood, and "the great schism in the South between what this region says it believes and how it behaves." The stories went out on the national wires, and looking back on it later, Jones was convinced that the Charlotte demonstrations, as much as those in any other city, delivered an important message to the country.
By the summer of 1960, the combination of moral and economic pressure, intensified by the national publicity, took its toll on Charlotte's white leadership. Many of the businessmen downtown decided finally that enough was enough, and the word went out that it was time for a truce.
"There was an understanding," said Jones, "that if we would just quietly come down and eat, the restaurants and counters downtown would be open."
In early July, to test that promise, Jones went with his father to the Rexall Drugs at Trade and Tryon in the heart of downtown. As the two of them sat down together to order, Jones thought about all those people in the past who had persevered through the years of slavery and segregation. He glanced at his father and saw the glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes, and as he picked up his sandwich, it seemed for a moment as if anything was possible.
But he also knew that the movement in Charlotte, however successful, was only one part of a much larger struggle. A few weeks earlier, he had met with activists from nine Southern states -- more than 150 sit-in veterans gathering in Raleigh at Shaw University. They met with national civil rights leaders, including conference organizer Ella Baker, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the man they found most eloquent of all, a Methodist minister by the name of James Lawson.
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