Integration Report

The Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy with a student sit-in at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four students Ezell A. Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, an all-black college, sat down at the segregated lunch counter to protest Woolworth's policy of excluding African Americans. These protesters were encouraged to dress professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that potential white sympathizers could join in. The sit-in soon inspired other sit-ins in Richmond, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia. As students across the south began to "sit-in" at the lunch counters of a few of their local stores, local authority figures sometimes used brute force to physically escort the demonstrators from the lunch facilities.




The "sit-in" technique was not new—as far back as 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored sit-ins in Chicago, St. Louis in 1949 and Baltimore in 1952. In 1960 the technique succeeded in bringing national attention to the movement. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student campaigns throughout the South. Probably the best organized, most highly disciplined, the most immediately effective of these was in Nashville, Tennessee. By the end of 1960, the sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio.



Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. Upon being arrested, student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges, to call attention to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, thereby saddling their jailers with the financial burden of prison space and food.



In April, 1960 activists who had led these sit-ins held a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC took these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further, to the freedom rides.

This is what it took. This is what it may take.

This day, non-hetrosexuals in this country awoke to the startling realization that in this supposed land of the free, having those freedoms would be based on how the mob feels about you.

And gays, Lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders, as well as others who live outside of the so-called norms, found out last night in Maine and other states that if they could wipe them all out, the mob would.

Of course there are those who feel that. And those who still have humanity enough to fight that.

But after all of the marches and speeches and activism and over 2000 episodes of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, a neutered country is not responsive to those who scream, "We are human, too."

The same screams that Negroes in the south (what we call blacks or African-Americans today) that were echoed by Martin Luther King in February of 1963. But it was not the impassioned-but-peaceful oratory of Dr. King that got Americans to pass the Civil Rights Act of the following year. Not an act of peace, but an act that was marked as one of the most horrendous of that or any other time.

It was Bull Connor and the Dogs of Birmingham...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9kT1yO4MGg

My question is this.....will it take an act this horrendous to force America to give non-hetrosexuals the same rights as hetros. Would Birmingham have to be played out all over again.?