On this day, 10 February 1960, civil rights sit-ins that had been moving through North Carolina, after beginning in Greensboro, arrived in Raleigh. Around 150 Black students demonstrated against whites-only lunch counters at drugstores across the city; the drugstores responded by closing the counters. Protests continued for several days, and crowds of racist white people heckled and harassed the protesters, sometimes escalating into violence. One white woman even reprimanded the aggression of the counter-protesters, stating: “You’re going about this in the wrong way… I’m as much a segregationist as you are, but I believe you should meet courtesy with courtesy.”
The mayor, WG Enloe, issued a public statement declaring: “It is regrettable that some of our young Negro students would risk endangering Raleigh’s friendly and cooperative race relations by seeking to change a long-standing custom in a manner that is all but destined to fail”.
But the protests were successful, and as part of a national direct action movement achieved the formal banning of segregation in 1964.
Pic: sit-in in Durham, NC https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2206921169493021/?type=3
What the fuck is it about the 80s that just made people lose it
All the lead poisoning mainly.
…They say, as though we’re not currently undergoing a similar epidemic of school shootings.
I’m reading “Going Postal” by Mark Ames (½ of the Radio War Nerd podcast) and a bunch of the survivors of these massacres keep going “yeah I get it”
the documentary The Great Postal Heist (free link/watch) which came out this year goes into extreme detail about the political attacks against the USPS that preceded the mass postal freakouts in the 80s. frankly everyone is lucky the casualty counts were so low, because no one has been fucked with more than the post office. BOTH parties will not stop until every single mail route in the United States is privatized. people have no idea how good the mail used to be in the 20th century. this is one of the largest, immediately-consequential-to-civilians issues in modern American politics and it’s almost entirely concealed/ignored.
