If you're looking for a way to completely lose yourself for an afternoon, the Southern Foodways Alliance has a new multimedia website, Counter Histories, devoted to the desegregation efforts that took place at the South's lunch counters.
The Nashville film segment is really great and features Linda Wynne, Gloria McKissack, and Matthew Walker, Jr. talking about what happened in Nashville. Walker, I think, does a really good job of getting at the simultaneous excitement and terror protesters felt when preparing to sit-in. McKissack tells a story about a white woman that is really haunting.
It is one thing I always wonder about when I hear stories of people being so wicked or seeing pictures, say, of college students smiling behind Confederate flags while in the audience for black speakers. Those people may still be alive. At the least, there are people in town who look at those photos and recognize the white people in them. Do any of the participants feel any kind of remorse for what they did? Or do they still go on feeling like they took some great stand for "the way things should be"? How do the people who recognize them make sense of it?
The students who chose to sit-in gave a lot of thought to what they were doing. They knew what they wanted and had a coherent, well-practiced, plan for how to get it. Even now, when they tell their stories, they speak really compellingly about why they did what they did and how they did it. Their experience, even as terrible as it could be, makes sense to them and gibes with how they understand themselves as people.
But I have to think that there are a lot of white people back then who did terrible things who now experience themselves as good people. And I wonder if that's because they're still unrepentant racists or if they've searched out forgiveness or if they're just pretending to themselves that they didn't do those things?
