Never underestimate the power of four teenagers.
Fifty years ago, a deliberate act of disobedience by four college kids shook America.
On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they’d been refused service. Ordering coffee at an all-whites lunch counter was an incredible act of courage. This was a time when young black men were lynched for supposedly looking the wrong way at a white woman.
Here is the original NYTimes story about that protest and what it started.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0201.html#article
Howell Raines, who covered the civil rights movement for the Times wrote an op-ed on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/opinion/01greensboro.html
The act of ordering coffee at a Woolworth’s lunch counter was not a “random act of kindness,” that clichéd panacea for the world’s ills. It was a deliberate act of defiance. and that got me thinking about deliberate defiance today.
What should we be defying?
The two wars?
The discrimination against Americans who want to marry or serve in the military?
Hope is a nice word. So is Change. But if we really hope to change anything, what should we be doing that would be as earth-shaking as ordering a cup of coffee?
