Civil Rights Pioneer: Post-Racial World Doesn’t Exist

by James Parks, Jan 18, 2010

From left, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair and Joseph McNeil, the four North Carolina A&T students who staged the 1960 sit-in, are shown leaving Woolworth’s.

The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is a good time to assess that post-racial world we’re supposed to be living in now. So, how’s it working out?

Not very well, according to Franklin McCain. He’s one of the four trailblazing students whose sit-in 50 years ago at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., ignited a nationwide effort that resulted in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Says McCain:

I don’t know where I was when racism disappeared from these United States of ours. This new right and the Tea Partiers have taken the position that anybody who talks about racial discrimination or affirmative action is a whiner or a civil rights pimp. We have to get off the sidelines and attack [that kind of language]….They are taking parts of our gains and using it against us. And it’s ridiculous.

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