Documents 143JAMES FARMER, ‘SEPARATION OR INTEGRATION? A DEBATE AT CORNELL
UNIVERSITY,’ 7 MARCH 1962
James Farmer, a pioneer of the sit-in tactic, defended students who wanted
immediate change in society’s racial rules. The tactic, as he notes, was readily
employed by anyone and was powerfully effective.
The masses of Negroes are through putting up with segregation; they are
tired of it. They are tired of being pushed around in a democracy which fails
to practice what it preaches. The Negro students of the South who have
read the Constitution, and studied it, have read the amendments to the
Constitution, and know the rights that are supposed to be theirs – they are
coming to the point where they themselves want to do something about
achieving these rights, not [to] depend on somebody else. The time has
passed when we can look for pie in the sky, when we can depend upon some-
one else on high to solve the problem for us. The Negro students want to
solve the problem themselves. Masses of older Negroes want to join them in
that. We can’t wait for the law. The Supreme Court decision in 1954 banning
segregated schools has had almost eight years of existence, yet less than 8
per cent of the Negro kids are in integrated schools. That is far too slow. Now
the people themselves want to get involved, and they are. I was talking with
one of the student leaders of the South only last week; he said, ‘I myself
desegregated a lunch counter, not somebody else, not some big man, some
powerful man, but me, little me. I walked the picket line and I sat in and the
walls of segregation toppled. Now all people can eat there.’... So that’s
what’s happening; you see, we are going to do something about freedom now,
we are not waiting for other people to do it. The student sit-ins have shown
it; we are winning. As a result of one year of the student sit-ins, the lunch
counters were desegregated in more than 150 cities. The walls are tumbling
down.
Source: Haig and Hamida Bosmajian, The Rhetoric of the Civil-Rights Movement(New
York: Random House, 1969), pp. 64–5.
Document 5‘WE SHALL OVERCOME’ (NEW WORDS AND MUSIC ARRANGEMENT BY
ZILPHIA HORTON, FRANK HAMILTON, GUY CARAWAN, AND PETE SEEGER)
This old spiritual became the majestic anthem of the civil rights movement.
Chorus We are not afraid....
We shall overcome, We are not alone (today)....Document 6