A New Raines at 'NYT'

Howell Raines, who exited as executive editor of the NYT after the Jayson Blair affair under less than loving conditions, returns online with this op-ed piece on the Greensboro sit-ins a half-century ago. Raines, of course, is a southerner who has written often and well about the civil rights struggle in decades past. After leaving the Times, he wrote op-eds for the Wash Post and other papers, and a monthly column for the original Portfolio. The new piece also probes the media role -- past and present. Here's an excerpt:

All Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond and Joe McNeil did was ask for coffee and doughnuts and politely decline to move until they were served — and try to engage a flustered white waitress and a bumbling store manager in a Socratic dialogue about the meanings of “serve.” Then, just like that, the black preachers who had challenged segregation in citadel cities like Montgomery, Ala., and Atlanta had found their natural allies: thousands of students who would become, before the end of the month, the shock troops of the civil rights movement.

It was always a fractious alliance. Not surprisingly, imposing black elders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. did not like being booed during church rallies for moving too slowly by militant students, many of whom cast themselves as radical Christian activists. But together, the team of preachers and students would show, within the space of three years, that the edifice of segregation was a lot like Georgia’s Stone Mountain, that imposing Confederate monument whose soft, exfoliating rock turns to dust under the hammer.

Now at the remove of 50 years, we can ask how it happened so fast — but not only that. We can also usefully ask how such an idealistic and altruistic movement might fare in today’s media environment.