Remembering the fight right here at home
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on March 8, 2015 1:50 AM
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News-Argus/ETHAN SMITH
Al Hall, right, who attended Thursday's 'Living Legacies' talk at Wayne Community College, poses a question to panelists after the talk.
His first question -- about the goals of the Civil Rights Movement -- drew a powerful response.
"It was about wanting our nightmares to stop so we could sleep peacefully in this so-called land of opportunity," Simmons said. "In the words of Jesse Jackson, we wanted to stop having pneumonia when the rest of the world had a cold."
At its root, the panelists said, the Civil Rights Movement was about equal rights.
"We wanted to be treated as any other citizen was, in Wayne County or anywhere else," Ms. Burden said. "In Goldsboro, you had to get on at the front of the bus and drop your dime there, then get back off the bus and go to the back entrance of the bus and get on there to find a seat, where seating was very limited."
Aside from discrimination in public spaces and accommodations, there was even division in the phone book. the panelists said.
"We wanted to be able to open the phone book and not be able to distinguish ourselves from our white neighbors," Ms. Burden said. "We had no handle attached to our name. White citizens had Mr. or Mrs. in front of their name. We didn't."
When peaceful protests began in Goldsboro, the panelists were in the thick of them -- and they were only teenagers.
Initially, Price took an editorial stance against the protests and refused to cover them -- a decision he says he now regrets.
He said he made the initial decision because he was afraid of the climate in the town.
"In the pool halls, discussion among whites was getting scary," Price said. "I was concerned about safety, and we were scared. That's why I made the decision at the time. But I can say now I was wrong."
After the paper was boycotted by the black community, Price decided to lift the coverage ban and added a young black woman to the newspaper staff.
Ms. Buffalo was part of the NAACP youth chapter in Goldsboro during the Civil Rights Movement, and vividly recounted the peaceful battles in which she took part to protest discrimination.
"I participated in lunch counter sit-ins at Woolworth's on South Center Street," she said. "Sometimes I would carry picket signs in front of the lunch counter and sometimes I would participate in sit-ins and try and get served."
Eventually, she was arrestd by local authorities -- all for attempting to eat lunch or to buy a movie ticket.
"My first arrest was right in front of the Paramount Theatre," Ms. Buffalo said. "I sat down in front of the ticket booth and refused to move after they refused to sell me a movie ticket. I went to jail and the $100 for bail was posted and I was free. My next arrest was the very next night. After that arrest I refused bail and was jailed for seven to 10 days."
Both Ms. Burden and Ms. Buffalo also described some of the toughest moments they experienced.
"There was a 52-year-old black janitor that worked at a local bank, and he was on his bike on his way to work when he was surrounded by a group of white boys who yanked him off his bike and beat him up and cut him," Ms. Buffalo said.
For Ms. Burden, her incident happened while she was on a date.
"There was a coffee shop there on Walnut Street, and I was on a date with a young gentleman," she said. "When we went in and sat down, something we had been taught was to put money on the table and it would sometimes persuade the servers to serve us. Our waitress refused, and called us (expletive deleted). My date had his arm thrown across the top of the booth, and my hair was in a ponytail. When the officers came they yanked him out of the booth and his arm came down and he knocked things off the table, which was a destruction of property charge, of course. They yanked me out of the booth by my ponytail and onto the ground."
Although the struggles occurred in the 1960s, each panelist said blacks are still fighting against discrimination today.
"The Civil Rights Movement brought about two powerful acts of Congress: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965," Ms. Buffalo said. "But there is legislation in Congress now trying to take away the rights we fought so hard to earn all those years ago."
Ms. Hurrey cautioned that if younger generations don't pay attention to the issues, rights that their grandparents and parents fought for will be for nothing. She added that the younger generation needs to study history and to appreciate how much was done for them by those who came before them.
"I guess you could say a lot of people became sick and tired of being sick and tired," Simmons said. "People of all stripes now are again becoming sick and tired of being sick and tired."