RALEIGH -- Many members of the college class of 2010 don't know what lunch counters are, let alone that 50 years ago, efforts to integrate them energized the civil rights movement in America.
From the successes of sit-ins at lunch counters and restaurants in Greensboro, Durham and other cities were born groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose first meeting was at Raleigh's Shaw University in April 1960.
On the group's golden anniversary this week, founders and former members of this civil rights organization will gather in Raleigh. Here, they'll put into perspective the risks they took and the advances they helped make for those not only shut out of restaurants, public libraries and parks, but also out of the political process and most forms of economic progress.
The Rev. David Forbes, now the preacher at Christian Faith Baptist Church in Raleigh, was 19 years old when he joined the series of meetings at Shaw where student activists were called to share their experiences and coordinate activities. Student delegates, 126 in all, attended from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, along with delegates from 19 northern colleges and civil rights groups.
They had the support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the energy and optimism of youth.
Forbes hopes that through workshops, panel discussions and social events at its 50th anniversary gathering Wednesday through Sunday, the group can pass the torch to new activists with new problems to solve.
"It's a reunion and a celebration of the fact that most of us have survived and thrived," Forbes said. "But at the same time, we seek to hand off to contemporary students an understanding that direct action and demonstration can be an effective means of protest."
Members of "Snick," as it came to be called, faced the risk of arrest or assault as they defied Jim Crow laws to orchestrate the Freedom Rides on segregated buses, coordinated voter-registration drives and helped lead the 1963 March on Washington. Some of its members went on to become influential in their own right: John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia; Julian Bond, who became chairman of the NAACP; Marion Barry, who became mayor of Washington.
Today's students, Forbes said, could rally around such issues as the disproportionate number of people of color in the nation's prisons; the trend toward resegregating public schools; or economic disparities that affect minority health care and housing.
One thing their involvement in SNCC taught Forbes and others, he said, was that "everybody counts. Everybody makes a difference.
"We did not feel that we were special, because we were with hundreds and thousands of others who were at least demonstrating their lack of acceptance of the status quo. There was this myth that black folks were satisfied. That was not the case."
As Forbes sees it, it shouldn't be the case still.
