I’m reading our coverage of the historic Greensboro Sit-Ins in February 1960. (They were actually referred to as the "sitdowns" in the paper.)
While we now celebrate the national significance of the actions of the four A&T students on Feb. 1, the newspapers here didn't seem all that excited at the time. The stories were short, the reporting was bare bones, and the students involved were rarely quoted. For such a dramatic event, the stories were almost boring. For the first several days, they didn't even make the front page.
The protests finally did make A1 of the Greensboro Daily News on Feb. 7.
I wasn't here in 1960, but using the clarity of hindsight, I can say that the sit-ins were seriously underplayed. Like, duh.
But in case you aren’t convinced that times have changed since 1960, consider the political incorrectness of “Today’s Chuckle” that is also on that Feb. 7, 1960, front page: Every man needs a wife because many things go wrong that one can’t blame on the government.
Well, I guess we can still blame the government for most things.
Some of the stories are here.
Not all of the newspaper's content appears online.
*There is a fee for downloading some older articles.