3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

fear they felt did not outweigh their complacency with the status quo. No matter how
frightened they might have been ofthe monumental changes brought to their world by the
civil rights movement, their fear did not translate into a collective effort to change along
with it . Instead, their fear hardened into an intransigent resignation to keep things as they
were .
The suspension of Wiltiams as NAACP president goaded him to make more
extreme comments. In a debate moderated by A. J. Muste, famed pacifist and labor
activist, he challenged Bayard Rustin and Dave Dellinger on the merits of self-defense .as
He suggested that freedom might necessitate deliberate violence on the part of blacks .
The NAACP permanently expelled him, but Williams continued to agitate locally,
incurring the wrath of local whites~'
As racial tensions mounted in Monroe, the attention of the nation again shifted to
a new arena . On February 1, 1960, four black college freshmen from North Carolina A&
T protested the Jim-Crow practices at Woolworth's in Greensboro by "sitting-in" at the
drugstore's lunch counter. Like Rosa Parks' refusal to relinquish her scat, it was a minor
gesture of major consequence . Within two weeks, the sit-ins spread to eleven cities in
five southern states. By the end of the month, young people, conducting sit-ins all over
`e"400 Hear Debate On `Violence' ;'~ [Baltimore] Afro-American (October l7,
1959) : l .
a9 0ne article, published in 1961, cited four attempts on his life during the previous
few years . See "Monroe, N. C. Editor Defies Bigots Who Threaten Life," The Pittsburgh
Courier (August 4, 1961): 2.
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