By By JONATHAN CLAYBORNE
Staff Writer
This year brings the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a youth-led civil-rights group whose roots took hold in North Carolina.
Born largely out of lunch-counter sit-ins and other nonviolent protests in southern cities like Nashville and Greensboro, the SNCC would coalesce into a core of young people who believed that blacks were constitutionally entitled to equal protection and opportunity under the law.
Never content to accommodate the incremental solutions favored by moderates, SNCC members preferred direct action to deals brokered by their elders and some members of the white power structure, various histories of the group show.
As this golden-anniversary milestone of civil-rights history passes, some local leaders are taking time to pause and reflect on what groups like the SNCC did — or are doing — to promote racial equality.
One of those leaders is Dorothy Comegys Parker, who graduated from Raleigh’s Shaw University.
According to the book “Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,” the SNCC congealed during a conference at Shaw.
The book, authored by U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, with assistance from Michael D’Orso, tells the story of the SNCC and Lewis’ evolution as a civil-rights leader.
Recently, Parker gave her own firsthand account of the strides that members of entities like SNCC and the NAACP made by putting their bodies on the line despite the constant threat of arrest, officially condoned brutality and murder.
“It was not as easy it sounds now,” Parker said. “It was kind of a dangerous thing. Of course, my parents didn’t know I was doing this stuff.”
Though Parker graduated from Shaw in 1958, and was affiliated mostly with the NAACP, she returned for a one-day, student-led organizational meeting at Shaw in 1960.
“The whole thing broke in ’60, but it started before that,” she said.
The student protests began with enrollees from local private colleges, but eventually they expanded to include peers from publicly funded colleges as well, Parker related.
“I certainly do remember — and definitely want it to be said — that there was more than just black colleges involved in this,” she said.
Parker wasn’t just a passive bystander in the movement. At times, she also marched in demonstrations and participated in sit-ins.
Her parents would not have approved, she said.
“They didn’t want me to go anywhere and try to change anything and try to get killed,” she said.
In her junior year at Shaw, Parker won the title of Miss NAACP, and defied Jim Crow custom by riding in a homecoming parade.
“It was a big, dangerous thing to do in those days, in an open-top car and all that stuff,” she said.
Later, Parker moved to Beaufort County.
In the late 1990s, she served on the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners — the first black person to serve in that capacity from the south side of the Pamlico River, she said.
“That’s very important because we do have two sides of Beaufort County,” she noted.
Her first husband, Paul Comegys, was the first black principal in Beaufort County, she said.
Parker has been honored as a life member of the NAACP.
Ann Cherry said that Parker talked about her involvement in the movement during an NAACP meeting about a year ago.
According to Cherry, a member of the Beaufort County branch of the NAACP, the remarks Parker made during that meeting resonated with many of the people in attendance.
“Some organizations would prefer to sit and dialogue where others would pick more of an aggressive approach where they feel like we’ve talked enough, like some of the issues we’re dealing with in Beaufort County today,” said Bill Booth, president of the county branch.
Booth said the NAACP focuses on social-justice issues that still affect its members in the 21st century, well beyond what is generally considered the historic height of the civil-rights movement.
As for Parker, “she was there” at that height, Booth said.