NCCU honors historic counter

DURHAM -- The half-century old F.W. Woolworth lunch counter looks like just the spot to enjoy a 10-cent cup of coffee and a 60-cent cheeseburger.

Unless you were classified as a social untouchable - and legally branded as Colored.

In that case, you wouldn't be served a meal at Woolworth, or other restaurants. The Formica-looking counter instead became the focal point of sit-ins, the front line of the nation's civil rights movement.

N.C. Central University on Sunday dedicated a section of the original counter used in the February 1960 sit-ins in Durham as the movement spread through the state and across the country. The innocuous-looking counter and orange-padded chrome swivel chairs recalled a tense time when "Negro" students refused to give up their seats while some local whites menaced the young black protesters.

Durham, along with Winston-Salem, were scenes of sit-ins one week after the historic lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, representing the spread of the movement to Raleigh and beyond. The Durham protest resulted in a visit by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered his "fill up the jails" speech at the White Rock Baptist Church.

It was a major victory for the protesters, generating news coverage, fear from local authorities, sympathy from the nation and ultimately culminating in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended legal discrimination in this country.

The N.C. Central ceremony, commemorating Black History Month, featured several original civil-rights protesters who are now of retiree age. They had remained silent about their experiences for years because the memories were so painful.

"We prayed before we went on the picket line," said Vivian McCoy, 68, a community activist in Durham who got involved at age 14. "We prayed after we came back, because you never knew if you'd come back alive."

McCoy and others recalled that in 1960 they were joined by white students and received clandestine meals from area black domestics, but were also criticized by some in the local black community who were terrified of a white backlash.

The events generated widespread coverage in the local media, including The News & Observer. The N&O reported that 50 Negroes "occupied" lunch counter seats for more than two hours at Woolworth until the store "closed in the interest of public safety."

The sit-ins quickly spread to McLellan's, Hudson-Belk, Kress, Eckerd's Drug Store, Walgreen's Drug Store, Cromley's Sir Walter Drug Store and Woolworth's in Cameron Village, the N&O reported in February 1960. The stores either closed or roped off their cafeterias.

"Teenage white hecklers moved from store to store, stood in the aisles near the lunch counters," the N&O reported. "They made low-voiced threats and occasionally would swagger along the line of Negroes."

The whites had ducktail haircuts, flaring sideburns and overalls. The N&O described one "overalled man methodically chewing tobacco." Raleigh Mayor W.G. Enloe was displeased that the protesters risked endangering "friendly and cooperative race relations" by attempting to change the "long standing custom" of racial discrimination.

On Sunday, the former activists recalled traveling from town to town to participate in sit-ins, sleeping on floors with newspapers for a mattress. McCoy described disguising herself in a wig and glasses to evade attention from the police, but she was arrested anyway.

"When we got arrested we sung all night," she said. "We didn't sleep. We kept the jailers up."