On a day when a $100 million project was announced for a Main Street tract that proved pivotal in the life of Leola Robinson-Simpson, she was working away at her desk at Greenville Technical College.
The site once held a Woolworth five and dime, where Robinson-Simpson and dozens of other teens staged a sit-in almost every week for two and a half years. They didn’t want to sit at the crowded Negro lunch counter in the back of the store any more.
Many of Robinson-Simpson’s fellow protestors attended Wednesday’s announcement that an eight-story retail-office tower would be built there. But Robinson-Simpson preferred to stay away.
“Main Street got a piece of me, 100 pounds of flesh when I was at a tender age,” she said. “I’ve done my part.”
She holds those memories close, all these many years later.
Greenville’s Main Street in the 1960s was a busy place – movie theaters, hotels, all manner of retailers, banks. And it was a place of division. White and black water fountains, entrances, waiting rooms. The public pool was closed to blacks as was the library. At Kress, a block from Woolworth’s, black patrons had to take their meals from a side door.
The first sit-in at Woolworth’s came in the spring of 1960. Robinson-Simpson was there. She and the others sat quietly at the white’s only counter in the front of the store until asked to leave. They returned the next week and the next.
“Once the statement was made, we left,” she said.
In time, when it became obvious their statement was not being heard, they waited until the police were called. Robinson-Simpson was 15 the first time she was arrested. She spent a week in youth detention.
As a youth leader for the NAACP, she traveled the state and was arrested protesting at the State House in Columbia, in Rock Hill, Raleigh, twice more in Greenville.
The arrests weren’t working so they appealed to the City Council. It was after Robinson-Simpson left for college, first in North Carolina, then in New York, that the lunch counter was integrated. It took white business leaders sitting down with the civil rights leaders to make it happen.
“We had no doubt change was going to come,” Robinson-Simpson said. “We felt this was the time and we went forward.”
She went on to work as a floor clerk at New York Hospital, then set up tutoring programs at the Greenville Urban League and Greenville Tech. In 1996 she was elected to the Greenville County School Board, where she’s served as a voice for all children who in some manner might not have as big a voice as others.
This is her last term on the board.
“It’s healthy to pass the mantle,” she said. “There’s one young lady I’m trying to push into running.”
Robinson-Simpson never believed the Woolworth’s property should be left as some sort of shrine. The store had been empty from the mid-1990s until it was torn down last year, and had become dilapidated.
“We don’t want to stand in the way of progress,” she said.
What matters is that the statue paying tribute to Sterling High School, which served the African American population until it burned down in the 1970, remains at the corner of Washington and Main. On Wednesday, Mayor Knox White told the crowd the site was sacred for the African American community and, to loud applause, said the statue would not be moved.
Robinson-Simpson believes Greenville would never have emerged from its small-town textile cocoon without the civil rights movement and the changes it brought. The Sterling statue is there for everyone who wants to acknowledge how far the community has come in the past 50 years.
“We need to preserve the markers of who we are and the growth that’s taken place,” she said. “It keeps us grounded.”
Tags: civil rights, Lyn Riddle, Woolworth
