Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP

4. Politics and Protest

81 4 Politics and Protest As 1960 began, Wilkins’s primary concern was ensuring passage of a new civil rights bill that would extend voting rights. The presidential election due to take place in November of that year promised change only inasmuch as both parties admitted the need for action on civil rights. Unfortunately , neither had the appetite for the fight that would be required to pass any meaningful legislation. When a new civil rights bill was initially proposed in 1959, Wilkins called for the support of NAACP branch officers , but warned them that Lyndon Johnson’s first priority was to maintain a united Democratic Party prior to the election and that he would sacrifice stronger legislation to ensure electoral success. But even before the legislation reached the Senate floor, four young black students brought the fight for equality back to the streets. On February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond , Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain deliberately took their seats at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter. As expected, they were refused service , but the four remained at the counter until the store closed, promising to return the following day, when they would resume their protest. Within five days, more than 500 students had joined the protests at Woolworth’s and Kress stores in the city. The students were organized as effectively as any Dixiecrat filibuster. They took turns occupying stools and made sure that protestors constantly took up most of the seats at the lunch counter. Within a week, similar protests were taking place across the state; within two weeks, sit-in protests were taking place in four states; and by the end of March, sit-ins had occurred in sixty-nine cities across the southern and border states—taking everyone, not least the NAACP, by surprise.1 82 ROY WILKINS The history of the civil rights movement is littered with false beginnings , but the scale and speed with which the sit-in protests spread across the South was breathtaking and transformative. As August Meier and Elliott Rudwick argue, the protests “speeded up incalculably the rate of social change in the sphere of race relations; broke decisively the hegemony of the NAACP in the civil rights arena and inaugurated a period of unprecedented rivalry among the racial advancement groups; and made non-violent direction action the dominant strategy . . . for the next halfdecade .” The sit-in protests also shifted the balance from one generation to another. Students, both white and black, now became the face of protest , changing its form and pace. The NAACP had to run fast to keep up.2 Within three weeks of the Greensboro protest Wilkins wrote to NAACP members to assure them of the Association’s support for the protestors. Initially, this involved paying bail money and other legal fees for protestors arrested during the sit-ins, but he also encouraged local branches to offer whatever other assistance they could. Falling short of outright encouragement to join the demonstrations, branches were urged to send letters and telegrams of protest to the presidents of Kress and Woolworth’s, to hold protest meetings, and to form small groups to visit their local Kress and Woolworth’s stores and warn them that they may be subject to economic boycotts if blacks were not served at lunch counters in the stores.3 Reflecting the different circumstances facing protestors in the South and members elsewhere in the country, Wilkins’s message was a little more vigorous to youth councils and college chapters in the North. Those groups were directed to picket Woolworth’s, Kress, and other stores that operated discriminatory policies.4 The implications of such a dramatic turn of events did not go unnoticed by commentators. A front-page article in the New York Times suggested that the protests indicated “a shift of leadership to younger more militant Negroes,” which would likely “bring an increasing use of passive resistance” as a protest technique. Shaken by these prospects, on the day the article appeared Wilkins called an emergency meeting with Gloster Current and Herbert Wright to discuss the new situation.5 Shortly after that, a three-day staff conference was hastily convened at the Motel on the Mountain in upstate New York to discuss the policies, programs, and strategy of the Association. Just before the meeting, John Morsell asked Politics and Protest 83 participants to think about the NAACP’s program and strategy...