Among the many challenges historians face is figuring out the processes by which long-oppressed ordinary people finally rise up and demand justice. During the 1950s, a liberating process was quietly under way among southern blacks, bursting forth dramatically in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and then, by the end of the decade, emerging across the South. Here are excerpts of the testimony of two individuals who stepped forward and took the lead in those struggles.

Franklin McCain

Desegregating Lunch Counters

Franklin McCain was one of the four African American students at North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, who sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, setting off a wave of student sit-ins that rocked the South and helped initiate a national civil rights movement. In the following interview, McCain describes how he and his friends took that momentous step.

The planning process was on a Sunday night, I remember it quite well. I think it was Joseph who said, “It’s time that we take some action now. We’ve been getting together, and we’ve been, up to this point, still like most people we’ve talked about for the past few weeks or so — that is, people who talk a lot but, in fact, make very little action.” After selecting the technique, then we said, “Let’s go down and just ask for service.” It certainly wasn’t titled a “sit-in” or “sit-down” at that time. “Let’s just go down to Woolworth’s tomorrow and ask for service, and the tactic is going to be simply this: we’ll just stay there.”

… Once getting there … we did make purchases of school supplies and took the patience and time to get receipts for our purchases, and Joseph and myself went over to the counter and asked to be served coffee and doughnuts. As anticipated, the reply was, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve you here.” And of course we said, “We just beg to disagree with you. We’ve in fact already been served.” … The attendant or waitress was a little bit dumbfounded, just didn’t know what to say under circumstances like that. …

At that point there was a policeman who had walked in off the street, who was pacing the aisle … behind us, where we were seated, with his club in his hand, just sort of knocking it in his hand, and just looking mean and red and a little bit upset and a little bit disgusted. And you had the feeling that he didn’t know what the hell to do. … Usually his defense is offense, and we’ve provoked him, yes, but we haven’t provoked outwardly enough for him to resort to violence. And I think this is just killing him; you can see it all over him.

If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed — I felt pretty clean at that time. I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever felt in my life. Seems like a lot of feelings of guilt or what-have-you suddenly left me, and I felt as though I had gained my manhood. … Not Franklin McCain only as an individual, but I felt as though the manhood of a number of other black persons had been restored and had gotten some respect from just that one day.

The movement started out as a movement of nonviolence and a Christian movement. … It was a movement that was seeking justice more than anything else and not a movement to start a war. … We knew that probably the most powerful and potent weapon that people have literally no defense for is love, kindness. That is, whip the enemy with something that he doesn’t understand. … The individual who had probably the most influence on us was Gandhi. … Yes, Martin Luther King’s name was well-known when the sit-in movement was in effect, but … no, he was not the individual we had upmost in mind when we started the sit-in movement.

Source: My Soul Is Rested by Howell Raines, copyright 1977 Howell Raines. Used by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.

John McFerren

Demanding the Right to Vote

In this interview, given about ten years after the events he describes, John McFerren tells of the battle he undertook in 1959 to gain the vote for the blacks of Fayette County, Tennessee. By the time of the interview, McFerren had risen in life and become a grocery-store owner and property holder, thanks, he says, to the economic boycott imposed on him by angry whites. Unlike Greensboro, the struggle in Fayette County never made national headlines. It was just one of many local struggles that signaled the beginning of a new day in the South.

My name is John McFerren. I’m forty-six years old. I’m a Negro was born and raised in West Tennessee, the county of Fayette, District 1. My foreparents was brought here from North Carolina five years before the Civil War … because the rumor got out among the slaveholders that West Tennessee was still goin to be a slaveholdin state. And my people was brought over here and sold. And after the Civil War my people settled in West Tennessee. That’s why Fayette and Haywood counties have a great number of Negroes.

Back in 1957 and ’58 there was a Negro man accused of killin a deputy sheriff. This was Burton Dodson. He was brought back after he’d been gone twenty years. J. F. Estes was the lawyer defendin him. Myself and him both was in the army together. And the stimulation from the trial got me interested in the way justice was bein used. The only way to bring justice would be through the ballot box.

In 1959 we got out a charter called the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League. Fourteen of us started out in that charter. We tried to support a white liberal candidate that was named L. T. Redfearn in the sheriff election and the local Democrat party refused to let Negroes vote.

We brought a suit against the Democrat party and I went to Washington for a civil-rights hearing. Myself and Estes and Harpman Jameson made the trip. It took us twenty-two hours steady drivin. … I was lookin all up — lotsa big, tall buildins. I had never seen old, tall buildins like that before. After talkin to [John Doar] we come on back to the Justice Department building and we sat out in the hall while he had a meetin inside the attorney general’s office. And when they come out they told us they was gonna indict the landowners who kept us from voting. …

Just after that, in 1960, in January, we organized a thousand Negroes to line up at the courthouse to register to vote. We started pourin in with big numbers — in this county it was 72 percent Negroes — when we started to register to vote to change the situation.

In the following … October and November they started puttin our people offa the land. Once you registered you had to move. Once you registered they took your job. Then after they done that, in November, we had three hundred people forced to live in tents on Shepard Towles’s land. And when we started puttin em in tents, then that’s when the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan started shootin in the tents to run us out.

Tent City was parta an economic squeeze. The local merchants run me outa the stores and said I went to Washington and caused this mess to start. … They had a blacklist … And they had the list sent around to all merchants. Once you registered you couldn’t buy for credit or cash. But the best thing in the world was when they run me outa them stores. It started me thinkin for myself. …

The southern white has a slogan: “Keep em niggers happy and keep em singin in the schools.” And the biggest mistake of the past is that the Negro has not been teached economics and the value of a dollar. … Back at one time we had a teacher … from Mississippi — and he pulled up and left the county because he was teachin the Negroes to buy land, and own land, and work it for hisself, and the county Board of Education didn’t want that taught in the county.

And they told him, “Keep em niggers singin and keep em happy and don’t teach em nothin.” … You cannot be free when you’re beggin the man for bread. But when you’ve got the dollar in your pocket and then got the vote in your pocket, that’s the only way to be free. … And I have been successful and made good progress because I could see the only way I could survive is to stay independent.

… The Negro is no longer goin back. He’s goin forward.

Source: From Looking for America, second edition, 2 volumes, edited by Stanley I. Kutler (New York: Norton, 1979). Reprinted with permission of Stanley Kutler.