NAACP is Putting the Heavy on Everybody but Obama About Jobs

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A day after the NAACP passed a resolution calling on the "Tea Party" movement to condemn unnamed racists in its ranks, I stood inside this city's old F.W. Woolworth, the scene of a truly important civil rights battle.

Pictured: Author DeWayne Wickham

 

The lunch counter inside the old department store -- now the focal point of Greensboro's International Civil Rights Center and Museum -- was the scene of a sit-in demonstration 50 years ago that sparked the greatest chapter of this nation's civil rights movement. The protest led to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The effort to end the store's refusal to serve blacks at its lunch counter was launched by four black college students.

They didn't issue a formal statement condemning the act of bigotry enraging them. They didn't try to fight their battle in the press, though their cause was certainly aided by the news coverage it got. Instead, they did something of substance: They walked up to that segregated lunch counter, sat down and requested service. Within days hundreds of people, black and white, joined their effort -- a campaign that pushed Congress to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations.

Of course, if there are racists in the Tea Party movement, the NAACP should track them down and call them out by name -- not inference. Ferreting out the racists among us is still important work. But the most important civil rights work the NAACP needs to do is in the economic arena.

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Source: DeWayne Wickham, USA TODAY

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