Contextualizing Skip and the sit-in anniversary

Some thoughts on the panel discussion at A&T last night kicking off the 50th anniversary activities commemorating the Woolworth's sit-ins:

Against my expectations, Skip Alston and Deena Hayes' behind-the-scenes advocacy for the downtown hotel project did not come up as a topic during the discussion. Hayes and her partner, John C. Greene, attended, but Hayes was not part of the program. Alston and museum co-founder Earl Jones spoke briefly about the museum, but made little mention of their role in developing the museum and no mention of the controversy that sometimes follows them. Credit them for that.

Jesse Jackson was the only prominent national civil rights leader who attended. No mention was made of Al Sharpton's absence. As I mentioned in my last post, the only reference to current Greensboro politics was Jackson's expression of regret that A&T students did not turn out at the polls last November and support the city's first black mayor, Yvonne Johnson. That comment was less a dig at the new white mayor, Bill Knight, than a lament that the bold and courageous actions of A&T students 50 years ago seem to be contrasted by apathy and disengagement in the current generation.

It strikes me that the voluminous commentary about the ethical questions surrounding Alston's backroom advocacy of the hotel are mainly a matter of concern for whites. (I offer the comment thread below the News & Record story, at Ed Cone's moderate-liberal blog and at Guarino's conservative blog as evidence.) In contrast, the black community has other preoccupations and distractions. Journalist Ed Gordon, the host of last night's discussion, referenced "the giant egos in the room" among black media and civil rights figures in previous affairs, and participant Warren Ballentine lamented that civil rights leaders are sometimes so concerned about who gets the glory that they never coalesce behind a program.

The discussion last night was wide ranging and sometimes disjointed, tackling disparate topics such as the need to give young black people trying to break into the entertainment industry a foundation in finance and business training, whether and how to constructively engage young people caught up in thug culture, and institutional barriers to black people obtaining capital to build wealth.

The forum also celebrated the legacy of Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan and David Richmond instead of dwelling on the controversies of press moment in the city's race relations. That's probably as it should be.

ADDENDUM: More sit-in anniversary events.

Jackson: 'A&T lost the mayor'

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson (left) and sports journalist Stephan A. Smith participated in a forum at the NC A&T University Alumni Events Center on Thursday. (photo by Quentin L. Richardson)

The overriding theme of a forum held tonight at the NC A&T Alumni Events Center to mark the inauguration of a series of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s sit-ins was apathy, and the distance between professional leadership and the struggling masses.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson concluded the evening by scolding his alma mater. He bemoaned the fact that roughly 10,000 students are enrolled in the historically black university and only about 200 voted in the last municipal election, which saw the city’s first African-American mayor, Yvonne Johnson, lose her contest by a margin of 921 votes. Noting the presence of Joseph McNeil, one of the A&T students immortalized as the Greensboro Four for initiating the Woolworth’s sit-ins on Feb. 1, 1960, Jackson insisted that such acts of engaged citizenship must continue.

“We lost the mayor, y’all,” he said. “A&T lost the mayor…. There are some people in this room tonight that should feel pretty guilty because you had a moment to be to a Greensboro Five, and you blew it for homecoming.”

Jackson’s statement referenced an earlier admission by panelist Gary Brown, a senior who is the chief of staff for the Student Government Association.

“The lack of young people voting, it was homecoming weekend,” Brown explained. “The student body was focused on homecoming. We were out there — Aggie leaders, elected officials and appointed officials — and we did our part. ‘You need to vote. You can vote.’ They didn’t do it. But we gave them the opportunity. What’s it going to take to make the light bulb go off? I hate to say it, but it’s going to take a disaster.”

The forum, broken into two panel discussions to reflect the retrospective and contemporary aspects of “21st Activism and Protest: The State of the Civil Rights Movement” was hosted by journalist Ed Gordon. The second panel, which was tilted towards younger participants, ended up stacking Brown and two other college students against two of Gordon’s professional media colleagues, Stephen A. Smith and Warren Ballentine.

“We can’t stop trying,” Brown had said in prefacing his disappointing report on voter participation. “We are the leaders of today. It’s our responsibility no matter how apathetic their attitudes to keep giving these people — our brothers and sisters — opportunities. That brother at the barber shop, maybe he’s part of that underworld drug thing. He may be involved in prostitution. Because that’s lucrative.”

Smith seemed to lecture Brown: “When you are a young man and you have just this rose-colored glasses in front of you and what you’re looking at, at some point in time you have to be practical about the way you go about things.”

Zim Ugochukwu, a UNCG student who founded Ignite Greensboro, riposted, “What is long with having rose-colored glasses? If Barack Obama didn’t have rose-colored glasses, then if someone said, ‘You can’t be president,’ he would have said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go to law school.’ And that’s it. So I think it’s important to have those dreams and have those aspirations because if you don’t have those, you’ll never be a leader.”

Ballentine interrupted, “Can please call President Obama ‘President Obama’? He’s my friend, but I call him ‘President Obama.’”

Addressing Smith, Gordon expressed a sense of weariness about the familiar contours of the discourse.

“You and Warren and I have done these panels, done these panels and done these panels,” he said. “And I can tell you truthfully that for 20 years in my life — I’ve got gray hairs to show it — we’ve heard the same stories, the same, ‘Well, when I grew up, the neighborhood beat you and then your mama beat you, and we need to get back to it.’ Okay, we ain’t got back to it in twenty years. So my question becomes, how do we move from rhetoric to movement?”

Smith, who makes no apologies for calling out black athletes on bad behavior in his work as a sports journalist, answered, “We got to stop being scared, and we got to recognize that there are some in our community that are a lost cause; they’re gone. We got this thing going on where we want to save everybody. Everybody can’t be saved. Some people are just a lost cause. The Bible — you talk about the word of God, but he recognizes the existence of the devil. The devil is there, you understand. And guess what? The devil comes in the form of blackness too. There are some straight-up black devils. They got to go.”

Jackson and another veteran civil rights activist, Benjamin Chavis — incidentally, a North Carolinian by birth — made what I thought were the most interesting comments, because both were rooted in the experience of the 1960s civil rights museum. I’m wrapping up for the night, but I may write more about them in the next couple days.

Despite what the billing indicated, the Rev. Al Sharpton was not present.