With the “kneel-ins” of Sunday, August 7, a new dimension was added to the student movement. Christian brotherhood is too often only an empty phrase. The fact that Negro students were graciously accepted in four white churches last Sunday shows that a few of Atlanta’s white citizens firmly believe in the equality of all men before God and that the church is the house of all people.
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Atlantans can be justly proud of themselves. The unity exemplified by the Negro community is an unheralded event. By working together and sticking together, the community has shown its determination to end a particular phase of segregation. The era of under-the-counter dealers is over. The behind-the-scenes advocates of “go slow” and “not now” must finally realize that their day has ended. During the height of the demonstrations, we heard that this was not the way, that the courts should decide, that businessmen do not yield to pressure. When a store hired Negroes above counter boys and sweepers, these sages told us that the stores had made up their minds from the goodness of their hearts; a picket line which cost the store thousands of dollars a week was not mentioned. We hear that this is a town of “goodwill,” peopled with citizens of “good intentions.” Are we to imagine that this “goodwill” and the proverbial paving of the road to hell, “good intentions,” are the solution to our problems? If so, we wonder why the problem exists at all. We have left the Supreme Court decision to the courts, and in six years barely one percent of the school districts in the South have integrated. As attorney Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP said here last Sunday, what we need is more “do-it-yourself integration.”
Recent events have shown here that people are tired of having a few men, conservative and ever-protective of their vested interests, compromise the rights of people into nothingness. We are tired of seeing the tactics of the segregator, dividing and conquering, used upon us by our own. We are tired of seeing “leading Negroes” leading us into fathomless pits of hopelessness. Too long has the tide of integration been halted by one grain of sand, a grain so horrendous in its implications that it is able to halt the rightful progress of the onrushing waters of freedom. . . .
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As the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Conference closed last Sunday night I thought of how wonderful the entire conference had been. Here we met and shared experiences and incidents of the summer, many rewarding, some disheartening, all adding to our determination to continue the struggle against discrimination until the battle is won. We have reaffirmed our faith in nonviolence not only as a technique usable in sit-ins and protest demonstrations, but as an actual way of life, as a real and vital part of everyday living. Through discussions and after-conference-hours sessions, we realize that the philosophy of nonviolence is the Christian philosophy that embraces and is embraced by the Golden Rule. We realize that mistakes have been made, and, in spite of these mistakes, the movement has flourished across the land, meeting and surmounting obstacles which were considered too difficult to surmount or situations beyond our control.
We learned that we must reemphasize the philosophies which have built the movement, not because we have begun to stray away but because continued emphasis will serve to make us more effective in the battle. Nonviolence is our weapon and our defense. We must clasp it to us.
We learned what so many of us had begun to realize. We learned that greater sacrifice is needed, that our dedication must be strengthened, that our programs must spread and cover the entirety of segregation. We must not settle for freedom at lunch counters. As have Atlanta and so many other protest centers, we must carry the battle to the enemy and attack him whether he lurks behind the restrictive covenant in real estate, behind the closed door at the employment office, if he manages to close the voting booth, or if he is able to direct us to the back door of the movie theater. Until all men can move freely, the beloved community will not exist. Until no man can restrict the liberties of another in a capricious and arbitrary fashion by using his color as a point of reference in choosing or refusing him, we must press onward and upward.
We learned the importance of sacrifice. As James Lawson, a student who was expelled from Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville for his part in the student protest movement, told the conference: “We lost the finest hour of the movement when so many of us left the jails of the South.” Lawson urged the students arrested for their participation in sit-in activity to stay in jail and told them to tell the leaders who asked them to accept bail and come home, “We can stand it in here just as long as you can stand it out there.”
Attending the conference was like having a breath of fresh air blown into a hot and stuffy room. I saw white students from northern colleges, whose only experience with discrimination must always necessarily be secondhand, ready to dedicate themselves far beyond the sacrifices which many Negro students, deeply touched by the evil in their daily lives, have refused to offer.
The student movement came about because young people saw many of their elders refusing to cope with segregation adequately. They saw other youngsters younger than they in Little Rock and other cities face mobs who would have deterred many a seasoned fighter. They saw that too often one person cries against wrongdoing, and one person cannot effectively act. They saw that ponderous Negroes were being raised to fight the 1954 Supreme Court decision, and they saw that only a massive attack could bring results. They saw that massive resistance must be met with passive insistence, and they saw that only in a movement which involved all of the people involved or in any way connected with the tense problem could any sort of effective change be wrought. They saw, finally, that it does no earthly good to talk and fret about segregation and that only action will enable man to talk of segregation as a thing of the past.
Lonnie King Is an Acid Victim
Responsible for reporting on student activities, Bond gave favorable coverage to COAHR and the larger student movement. Below is an example of one of his news reports—this one appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1961—about an attack on his good friend Lonnie King.
Even though he was almost blinded by acid flung in his face, student leader Lonnie King has vowed that his anti-segregation activities will continue.
King, a Morehouse College senior, is chairman of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), the student group here that has been leading the fight against Jim Crow since March 1960.
An unidentified white man threw the liquid, identified in a Grady Hospital report as “acid,” in King’s face while the young integration leader was walking in a picket line before Mann Brothers grocery store here.
King asked police officers D. C. Taylor and D. S. James, who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident occurred, to take him to a hospital, but they replied, “Take a bus.”
Another police officer, Lieut. Strickland, later told them to take King to Grady Hospital for emergency treatment.
A doctor at the hospital told King that “if he had not been wearing sunglasses,” his eyes certainly would have been damaged.
The hospital report said that “acid was thrown into the patient’s face.”
It was so powerful it took paint off the picket sign he was wearing. Student leader Charles Black said that “after the incident, police left the scene.” Bystanders filled the area despite police warnings that gatherings would not be tolerated.
Black, who was marching behind King in the picket line, said that the assailant had been standing near a phone booth for some time before he threw the acid.
Black said that the man finally walked up to King, threw the acid, and ran away.
King immediately threw off his sign, and ran across the street to a Gulf Oil service station and asked for water to soothe his burns.
He was refused and walked a block farther to a Shell service station where he was given water and a chance to use a telephone. After calling COAHR headquarters, he returned to his place on the picket line.
Black said that hecklers who had been standing outside the store “all