FRANKLIN McCAIN

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. 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.

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. …

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 : Clayborne Carson et al., eds., The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (New York: Viking, 1991), 114–116.