IN the pre-digital America of 1960, “viral” was still a medical term. So it was written in countless news articles that the student sit-in movement had “spread like wildfire” on black campuses across the South. On the morning of Feb. 1, 50 years ago today, four black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University seated themselves at the all-white lunch counter in a Woolworth’s dime store in Greensboro. Within hours, news of this bold act by the Greensboro Four, as they would come to be called, had grapevined its way from A&T to the campuses of historically black colleges in Atlanta and Nashville.  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. As Jack Bass, a Southern newspaperman turned historian, observed when we talked the other day, it was a time when everybody watched the three network news programs. It was also a time when hysterical jeremiads about the perils of change were not part of the mainstream news flow.  Sure, conservative columnists like Rowland Evans and Robert Novak clucked about Communist influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Paul Harvey seemed vaguely disturbed by dark-skinned youngsters who talked back to Southern sheriffs. But straight, eyewitness reporting dominated television news, and Northern print reporters flooding the region quickly shamed Southern newspapers into covering civil rights in a way that began to look, let us say, balanced  or even, in a few cities, fair.  What seems remarkable in retrospect is the factual authority of network news in those days. Dixie’s politicians, of course, accused the national anchors of bias. But the pictures trumped the home-cooked propaganda, as when you put a spittle-spraying Southern governor up against a Greensboro Four leader like Franklin McCain, in his earnest Sunday clothes, offering a cogent critique of Woolworth’s Southern business strategy as it related to black shoppers nationwide. It took only one national telecast of Nashville students being assaulted at the lunch counters to demonstrate that segregation everywhere depended on the unconstitutional application of police brutality.  With such an agenda of real news, how one dreaded seeing some ponderous network commentator interrupt the reporters to claim his 90 seconds of air time. There was simply no need to put a scrim of opinion between the viewer and fresh news film.  Today, however, there’s no denying that traditional reportage of political and social trends seems almost as out of date as segregation. Surely the civil rights movement would have been hampered by the politicized, oppositional journalism that flows from Fox News and the cable talk shows. Luckily for the South, that kind of butchered news was left mostly to a few extremist newspapers in Virginia and Mississippi and to local AM radio talk shows that specialized in segregationist rants.  Howell Raines, a former executive editor of The Times, covered the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s.
The Greensboro sit-in changed the segregated South faster than anyone predicted, but the news media miscalculated the lasting political implications.