Civil rights protest finally gets its due

DURHAM -- The vacant lot at the northeast corner of Dowd and Roxboro streets doesn't look like much. But an ice cream parlor once stood on that spot, and more than 50 years ago, seven bold African-Americans made history.

The June 23, 1957, sit-in there didn't attract the attention of a similar protest nearly three years later at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro. But on Monday, nine history professors decided it was significant enough to earn official state recognition. So after five decades and two attempts by Durham activists, the state next year will place an official North Carolina highway marker on the site, denoting the location of the Royal Ice Cream Co. sit-in.

It will be just the fourth dedicated to the civil rights movement.

Virginia Williams was 20 when she took part in the protest. She recalled Monday walking in the back door because she knew she wouldn't make it through the front before taking a seat in the white section.

Williams, now 70, spoke eloquently in support of the highway marker Monday, her words helping to sway the highway historical marker advisory committee to unanimously approve the marker. The committee, made up of history professors from across the state, assembled in a cramped room at the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh and listened intently. Members asked just a few questions before unanimously approving the marker.

In doing so, they reversed a 2002 decision by the same committee, which, with entirely different membership, declared that the Durham sit-in didn't have enough statewide historical significance.

"I am overwhelmed," Williams said after the brief hearing. "It highlights what we did. Even though it's 50 years later ... I'm delighted."

That 2002 committee and previous versions had held that the Greensboro sit-in, which is memorialized at the Smithsonian Institution and taught in history books, ought to stand as representative of all such sit-ins. It received its highway marker in 1980.

The current committee took an alternate view.

"I think it's significant because it does illustrate the civil rights movement before Greensboro," said committee member Jeff Broadwater, a history professor at Barton College in Wilson. "Sometimes we think the civil rights movement started with Greensboro."

Durham activists have long argued that the Durham event, coming 2 1/2 years before the Greensboro sit-in, laid much of the groundwork for future civil rights protests.

State Sen. Floyd McKissick Jr., a Durham native whose father helped represent the group after its members were arrested, argued Monday that the sit-in directly led to other such protests.

"It was the seed that helped fertilize all the activity in the Piedmont of North Carolina," he said. "There had to be a catalyst; it was bold, it was defiant, but most importantly, it was the start."

The sit-in was led by the Rev. Douglas Moore, a 28-year-old Durham minister who took the group to the ice cream parlor, which was in a black section of town. It had an entrance for whites on Dowd Street and an entrance reading "Colored Only" on the Roxboro Street side. Inside, a partition separated the two sections.

Members of the group sat in booths on the white side and refused to leave. They were arrested and charged with trespassing. The headline in the Durham Morning Herald the next day read "Integration Bid Is Made At Soda Bar; Seven Negroes Cited to Court on Trespass Count."

Moore's explanation to the newspaper: "We went to the white side because it was more suitable to our group -- larger and with better service. The bigger percentage of patronage at the Royal is Negro, and for this reason alone there should be no racial barrier."

Each protester was found guilty and fined $10 plus court costs. The case was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the charges and fines. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Slightly more than 1,500 historic markers dot the state's highways, each denoting a person, place or event that this committee has deemed of statewide significance. The committee meets twice a year and considers between 10 and 20 proposals, often granting fewer than half those requests.

MARKER TO GO ON VIEW NEXT YEAR

Durham's newest historic highway marker will cost $1,350 and will be unveiled sometime next spring or early summer.

It will read: "Segregation protest at an ice cream parlor on this site, June 23, 1957, led to court case testing dual racial facilities."