There will be a grand opening ceremony on Monday for the new civil rights museum in downtown Greensboro, NC. The building is the former F.W. Woolworth store that was the site of America's first sit-in protest at a racially segregated lunch counter. Because the store was closed and abandoned for so many years, they have been able to restore the lunch counter to its original appearance at the time of the protest. That event marked a key turning point in the fight against Jim Crow laws in the South and in the larger Civil Rights Movement. Following the example of Rosa Parks in 1955 in her ground-breaking act of civil disobedience, about 300 students from nearby A&T University eventually joined a group of four that was refused service at the lunch counter on February 1, 1960. Protests continued there for six months, as the movement spread throughout the South. The first successful lunch counter sit-in took place in Winston-Salem, about 25 miles west. On July 25, 1960, Woolworth's made the decision to begin serving black customers at its Greensboro location. This was more than three years prior to Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
Sadly, this generation could care less about such stuff... This generation is more interested in 'mind trips' and 'getting high' and contacting 'mediums' and 'self endulgence'...and other things that ring hallow... It's not their fault I suppose...just products of easy going pop culture... It all rings hallow though...there is no depth to it anymore...just 'me'... Everything centers around 'self' now... Now even 'cute' people feel like 'precious little victims'.... 'Oh, that person looked at me the wrong way.(swings hair in the wind)..I'm so cute, I'm such a victim..where's my Starbucks coffee?'... It will all disolve soon, cause it's all so hallow....
It must be so weird to be an ethnicity back then. I think you're right. Today's generation is preemptively focused on themselves, so that they can not empathize with those less fortunate than them.
Wierd?...more like harsh, and dangerious, and humiliating...but from such an enviornment rose some of the greatest leaders this nation has ever seen, both black and white... That generation can never be duplicated...and the people who sympathised, such as yourself, would later form the foundation of the original hippie movement... The off spring of many of the ardent racist simply said 'enough'...and thus began a movement... The churches, who preached love and salvation, did nothing to correct social errors...instead it was middle and upper class white hippies, who put everything on the line, who jumped into the fray... You will never see this duplicated...back then, to be white, and publicly be on the side of 'freedom' and 'equality' for non white citizens...was a big social no no...it took a lot of bravery for those who stood up... And often many were ostricized, cut off from families, beat up and harraced. Young whites, back then, who supported the black equality movement, were called names I can't repeat on here... And these young whites, many of them, came from privaledged homes...and still put it all on the line for principle... A special breed indeed.... One you will never see replicated...
