Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Well, it's good to be here
back at Stanford
I'm kind of remembering. The fifties were very quiet here; we did a lot of studying.
We also partied and we studied. That was about it.
But as far as civic action,
not so much. But then in the spring of 1960 we did.
There were sit-ins at the Woolworth stores in the South
because they were refusing
to seat black people at their lunch counters.
So a group of
us, organized by the religious groups, went to Woolworth's
in Palo Alto, and
there we had informational picketing,
we had flyers
urging people not to patronize at Woolworth's,
and educating folks about sit-ins. And that was the beginning of sit-ins.
And that was the beginning of the sixties, and all the protests that we were involved with after that.
You know, I don't remember anyone trying to stop us.
I remember some heated conversations with people
saying, "Well, what does this have to do with us?"
And a feeling
that we weren't changing very many minds. But that was just the beginning, and all consciousness-raising starts here and goes up, right?
So, although there weren't confrontations. We, looking back I see that we were getting an important idea there,
like a seed, and we were helping it grow.