Sit-in Pioneer Finally Honored with Gravestone
By JIM SCHLOSSER, Staff Writer

Friday, January 31, 1997

A stone will soon mark the grave of civil rights hero David Richmond, who died young after making history.

His friends know David Richmond wouldn't seek an apology for the delay. He was forgiving, as the F.W. Woolworth Co. discovered long ago.

Saturday - on the 37th anniversary of the Greensboro sit-in and over six years after Richmond's death at age 49 - friends will announce that a monument will be erected at his unmarked grave.

A bus load of Richmond's friends and family members will gather at 10 a.m. at the grave site in Carolina Biblical Gardens, off old Interstate 85, near Jamestown. The organizers had hoped to unveil a stone that says: "David L. Richmond, 1941-1990, civil rights hero; one of the original Greensboro Four; Feb. 1, 1960; Love leads to Freedom."

The marker, though, won't arrive in time from the manufacturer. The dedication will be held anyway, with Greensboro Mayor Carolyn Allen, former Carolina Peacemaker editor Hal Sieber, the Rev. Otis Hairston and others speaking. Letters of tribute will be read, including one from a new member of Congress, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill. Jackson is an an alumnus of N.C. A&T, as was Richmond, who was a classmate of Jackson's famous father.

David Richmond's family intended to erect a marker after his death on Dec. 7, 1990, but held off when told that Richmond's admirers wanted to create something special. It didn't get done until now. Several companies and individuals are financing the monument.

The complications that have arisen over the stone symbolize much of what happened in Richmond's life.

Making history as a teenager - he was 18 at the time of the sit-in - proved a tough burden for him to carry as an adult. Personal problems overwhelmed Richmond. He dropped out of A&T just short of graduation and later spent most of his working years as a janitor. His three sit-in partners - Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeill and Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan) - all graduated and left Greensboro after their college years. All succeeded in various fields.

Richmond showed no envy, though not getting his degree bothered him greatly. (After his death, A&T awarded him an honorary doctorate.)

He also held no grudges against those who insulted him in the past.

Woolworth's wouldn't sell Richmond a cup of coffee at its whites-only lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. When refused service, he and three A&T classmates refused to leave.

Their defiance started a chain reaction at segregated lunch counters throughout the South. Today, the four men are considered pioneers in the American civil rights movement. An exhibit honoring them is on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta. The old Woolworth's Store on South Elm Street is being converted into the International Civil Rights Museum.

After the Feb. 1 sit-in in 1960, it took six months of pressure and negotiations before Woolworth's agreed to integrate its lunch counter. For years afterward, a rail-thin Richmond occasionally ate at Woolworth's, often without being recognized. In 1988, over coffee at the lunch counter, he was asked why he patronized a place that had treated him so shabbily.

"It was just an accepted policy at the time," he said about segregation. "All the stores downtown were doing it. I commend Woolworth's for being the first to end it. All the other stores later followed."

He praised Greensboro for integrating peacefully. He saluted police officers for not bullying and abusing as did officers in Birmingham and other Southern cities. Richmond always singled out one white man, clothing store owner Ralph John, for encouraging A&T students to challenge the status quo in 1960. He felt John deserved more credit for the sit-in than history had given him.

Yet, he felt frustrated that decades after the sit-in, black people and white people seemed so far apart, socially and economically. "David was a gentle, thoughtful, thinking person who hurt, physically hurt, because people weren't good to each other," says his best friend, Hal Sieber, who is now an official with Project Homestead, a nonprofit agency that builds houses for low-income people.

In America, becoming a hero often brings riches. Not for Richmond. He didn't own a car and rode city buses. He once told an interviewer: "All I need is a bar of soap and something to eat and some water, and some clean clothes, and I don't need many of those."

In the early years, after A&T, he found getting a good job tough. Employers would learn he was one of the students who had "caused trouble" at the Woolworth's store. They figured he might do the same in the workplace.

His one good job, as a supervisor with a federal anti-poverty program in Greensboro, didn't last. Funding cutbacks closed the office.

His longest-running job was doing clean-up work at a health center for the elderly. At five-year intervals, he emerged for big sit-in anniversaries. In between, schoolchildren in Greensboro would seek him out when term papers about the sit-in were due. He occasionally spoke to classes. He collected honors, such as the Chamber of Commerce's Levi Coffin Award. He kept the plaques in a box, never displaying them.

"Dave was Dave," Sieber says. "He was a beautiful person. He had a number of flaws, which he recognized, which his friends recognized. But amid those flaws, there was no arrogance or artificiality or hypocrisy or duplicity."

Richmond's private life was a wreck. His first marriage broke up. So did a second. Drinking and smoking became a problem and slowly destroyed his body. He agonized over his parents, who had become old and infirm. He moved into their home and cared for them during their last years.

He could be often seen with Sieber, drinking coffee at the Mayberry ice cream parlor in Summit Shopping Center. There, Richmond would sometimes weep about society's problems and his own. "I think he bore the responsibility for his own flaws," Sieber says. "He accepted the responsibility for the disintegration of his family, and it bothered him that he couldn't live up to what he thought he should be doing."

Even though he felt he failed his children, Richmond watched with pride as they grew up. A son, David (Chip) Richmond Jr., became a starting wide receiver for Wake Forest. A daughter, Lynn Massenberg, was a track star at St. Augustine College. Richmond himself had excelled in track at Dudley, where he served as student body president. Another of Richmond's children, Angela Morton, became homecoming queen at Page and is now a successful auto sales representative in Greensboro.

"David was my idol," says Franklin Richmond, his younger brother by five years. "He was always there when I needed him, and I tried to be there for him when he needed help."

Franklin Richmond anguishes over not recognizing the extent of David's alcohol problem and the damage it was doing to his health. No one realized it. By the time someone did, Richmond was beyond medical help.

His last public appearance was Feb. 1, 1990, the 30th anniversary of the sit-in. Hundreds of people packed the Woolworth's store that day. Richmond and his three classmates from the past sat together again at the counter.

Ten months later, Richmond was at Moses Cone Hospital, dying of lung cancer and other complications. His family and Sieber were with him. "He squeezed my hand," Sieber recalls, "but he didn't say anything." He didn't have to. He had made a mighty statement 30 years before.

"I think he died knowing that he had done something important for his community," Sieber says, "and for his country."

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