Today is a historic day, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the news. I guess not a day goes by that something of historical significance is not celebrating an anniversary, but some things are bigger than others. Today is one of those days and I feel like for all our progress to become a more accepting, tolerant and unified nation we’re losing sight of what it took to get here. Today we have a black President, and no I won’t say African American any more than I would call another American an Italian American or Scottish American. We are Americans with only the slimmest percent of us hailing from this beautiful, massive and rather segregated (geographically) country of ours. So why was it so difficult for me to find information about the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in that happened fifty years ago today? Where is our national pride celebrating an event that acted as a lightning rod the already swelling civil rights movement?
The whites only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, NC was the site that four black students picked to sit down and demand service. At this point in history Martin Luther King Jr. was already the face of civil rights reform, Malcolm X was on the scene and feisty Rosa Parks had camped out on that seat on the bus five years before. The fight for racial equality was not new, but within six months of that day Woolworth’s would desegregate. Over 50 cities in nine other states had their own sit-ins just two months later. This day accomplished something real and lasting and the fact that it happened in the state I currently call home does make me proud. So where the hell is the press? What happened to the expected op-eds or the feel good stories?
It’s hard to make lasting progress in this country when we don’t remember that progress was even made. Women are still getting pregnant and changing their behavior just for the chance of finding someone to love them and the biggest critic Hillary Clinton faced were other women calling her a bitch. Minorities have celebrated the nomination of our first black President, but the acknowledgement of what we've come through as a people seems to be slipping away. We are all trying so hard just to live a good life and grab a piece of that elusive American dream we’ve been hearing about our entire lives, that some of us no longer remember the struggle that even made that a possibility for us. Think about it, 50 years. It was less than 50 years ago that we had routine segregation of the races and open bigotry. That means we all know someone alive at that time, someone who may have experienced it first-hand or at least lived at a time when it was happening to someone in our nation.
It’s difficult to criticize minorities as a white person in America, but as a woman I’m still in the fight for equal rights. We may not have been prejudiced against in as open or as hateful a way as racial minorities, but we’re still getting the shaft. Everyone knows to keep their racist comments to themselves if they still subscribe to that hate-filled lifestyle, but we’re not yet there with women. It’s still okay to routinely objectify us, hell we do it to each other. No one is meaner to women than other women. I guess what I’m saying is that I expected a bigger acknowledgement of the sacrifices made in bringing us to a point in America that a black man can be president—we’re clearly not ready for a woman President of any color – but we have made historic racial strides so let’s celebrate it. NPR spent much of today paying tribute to those four black students and sharing not only their stories, but the stories of their living family members and the legacy they created. Sadly, not enough people listen to NPR, so we’re losing some of our important history, because we’d rather talk about Lady Gaga’s Grammy wardrobe. I guess we've come a long way after all, it's just not something to be as proud about.
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