The grainy black-and-white photograph, taken 30 years ago, captures the fear in David Richmond's eyes on the day he dared to cross the color line. He's the one on the left, the skinny kid in the trench coat, standing beside three other young black men. That winter day in 1960, those four college students broke the segregation barrier by taking seats at F.W. Woolworth's downtown lunch counter. The sit-in shook the sleepy North Carolina city and ignited a nationwide movement to topple Jim Crow's walls. But Richmond says all he felt that day was "scared, scared, scared."
Today, as he gazes at the Greensboro Historical Museum's sit-in exhibit, complete with four original chrome-and-vinyl stools, Richmond is not frightened. But he is troubled. All around, Richmond sees an enduring legacy of segregation and wonders why things have not improved. "I would've hoped that things would've been better, but they're not getting any better," he laments. "They're getting worse."
Wait a minute. Aren't things much better than they were in 1960? Blacks and whites eat together at the same lunch counters. They work side by side in offices. Black families can buy houses in white neighborhoods. They can shop in any store, stay in any hotel, apply for any job, run for any political office. Since the sit-ins, the visible progress in civil rights has been monumental. So why is Richmond troubled?
Because Greensboro, like the rest of the nation, finds itself face to face with a more intractable form of separation that is insidious but not illegal. The laws that opened restaurants and rest rooms have not changed minds, and that is precisely where the color line is drawn these days.
Greensboro (pop. 195,495), a prosperous town set on North Carolina's lush Piedmont Plateau, has been a national bellwether of race relations. It was not only the birthplace of the sit-in movement but also the site of one of the most horrifying episodes of racial violence since the 1960s. In 1979 five Communist Workers Party members taking part in a "Death to the Klan" rally were gunned down in the street by American Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
The legacies of the two events are still entwined. Three decades after the sit-ins, some people, black and white, wonder if desegregation has failed. Others, of both races, contend that integration has always been a pipe dream. Still others favor a return to separate societies. Observes Greensboro school superintendent John A. Eberhart, who is white: "The question is, are we going to move apart or are we going to move together?"
Signs of separation persist in the city's neighborhoods, nightclubs, gazes and words. A perspiring black man, nattily dressed in suspenders, white shirt and a hat, pushes a mower across a lush lawn just yards from the elite, whites-only Greensboro Country Club. Downtown, as professionals head home at night from glistening glass office buildings, an army of blacks -- so-called invisible people -- arrives to empty the trash and vacuum the floors. One leading white liberal lapses, unconsciously perhaps, into talk about "coloreds" and "black boys."