When We Hide the Past in Plain Sight

This is a rather ordinary storefront in the older part of Greensboro, North Carolina. One thing you do notice is how fresh and new the sign looks on this F.W. Woolworth Co. building.

Take a look inside the building, and you’ll see that it’s a museum to memorialize a time in this then-tiny town where Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond, students at the local HBCU Agricultural & Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University), sat down in the store’s lunchroom and ordered coffee in the area reserved for white people. (There’s an important point here.)

The young men, being Black during the time of legal Jim Crow, were refused service.

They sat for several hours, abused and ignored, but also supported and acknowledged, until the store closed down around them and they left.

The sit-ins at this store continued for six months. When the college semester ended and the college students went to their homes, the local high school students took their place.

These four young men had planned this non-violent protest with the deliberate choice to provoke resistance.

This sit-in inspired other sit-ins that spread throughout the country, and these sit-ins were part of the general social unrest that demanded change.

And for a brief moment, the moral arc of the universe bent ever so slightly closer to justice.

Now, what is unusual about this sit-in was not just that the store’s segregation was divided to provide service for white people and Black people alike.

The important point here is that the segregation was ostensibly legal because both groups were provided service that was ostensibly equal. A white woman could get a coffee. A Black woman could get a coffee.

But the segregation wasn’t just the inequality of service. The larger point was the segregation of people to prevent people of different races from associating with each other in a meal or in a school or in a church or . . .

The argument was that “we are providing the same service but just not at the same time with people who want it together.”

Schools were segregated with the same rationale: we provide equal service for every child, no matter Black or white, but Black children and white children could not receive that education together. So while there might be people who were comfortable sitting or worshipping or working or learning together, the laws of segregation and the customs that created those laws prevented that.

Now, the reality is that the services and goods provided to Black people and white people were, in fact, different. Different in quality. Difference in scope. Different in application. Different in results. Education is the most obvious one, with schools for Black children that were old or decrepit buildings with a lack of heat, a lack of books, a lack of resources, and a lack of trained teachers, whereas white children were pampered with the best available schooling.

A restaurant could not provide the same service, really, because in many cases, the service received by Black people was conditioned upon the demand that they take it away to eat whereas white people could sit in a restaurant and eat it in peace and comfort. Or, there were two separated lunchrooms, sometimes by walls, sometimes by barriers. This Woolworth lunchroom was such an example. Separation was about keeping people apart, and in doing so, the separation provided a lesser experience but for the same price.

Except in a very explicit case that is represented by a Coke machine in the waiting room of the train station, an artifact from the past that you can see among the museum’s exhibits.

The station had physical separation between white people and Block people. Barriers kept them apart, from the entrances to the corridors to the trains where white people either got the front of the cars or whole cars, and Black people got the back of the car or a car by themselves.

Same price, different service. And if a train car reserved for Black people was full but the white cars were not, no Black passenger could sit in an empty seat in a white car.

In the case of this Coke machine, it was a single machine with a dispenser on each side. The exact same Coke bottles were put into the machine to serve an ice-cold soda to any customer. One side was for white people. The other side was for Black people.

But . . .

This machine was designed to allow a different, higher price to be charged to Black customers. Whereas a white customer paid a nickle, the Black customer paid a nickle and a penny – 20% more – or eventually a dime—100% more.

Because the two sides were separated by a barrier, a customer could not just walk around to see the other side.

Jim Crow not only was ugly and demeaning, it extracted wealth from Black people to make white people richer.

Now, this machine distributed products from the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola company for its customers wherever a two-faced Coke machine could be installed. This was but one of the many models made for use in different areas, but only this model was designed by Jim Crow.

You don’t see them today because soda dispensers have become much more sophisticated.

However, if you want to see some of the older soda machines, the museum of Coke at the Coca-Cola offices contains models from these early years.

Except this one.

You can not only NOT find an example of this one, the company will not admit it exists. The past is a terrible set of negation and deprivation and suppression and denigration. It’s so bad we can’t look at it or talk about it or even admit it happened the way it happened.

Jim Crow is an evil, yes, and many of us have a social response of “that’s so terrible.”

But we do not want to admit how terrible it was and is again.

We are a country of people proud to be Americans but so ashamed of our actual history that we erase it and suppress it from being taught and learned and seen.