Yesterday, I had the pleasure of helping chaperone a group of students on a field trip to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Ronald Edmonds, who teaches an advanced placement history class at Anacostia Senior High School, thought a visit would dovetail nicely with a recent classroom discussion on non-violence and the struggle for civil rights. The exhibit we visited was a section of the whites-only lunch counter from the F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1960, four black students from the Agricultural and Technical College – David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair (now Jibreel Khazan) and Joseph McNeil – sat at the counter and asked to be served. They weren’t, but they remained at the counter peacefully until closing. They, and others who joined them over the months, kept at it until the Woolworth chain dropped its discriminatory policy.

The exhibit is not as staid as it sounds. An actor, Xavier Carnegie, was there to lead visitors through the history, portraying a composite character based on young people whose task was to train others in the techniques of non-violent protest. Some of us were drafted into participating, sitting with Woolworth menus like those four teenagers, surrounded by others who were enlisted to represent those who verbally abused and threatened the protesters. Carnegie asked his audience if we thought we could have done what those teenagers did, leading me to reflect on my own unmomentous and unintentional involvement with integrating a segregated establishment – in 1956.

The summer of that year, my family was visiting my mother’s hometown in the Alabama countryside, a community begun as a coal company-owned camp for miners and their families. My grandmother’s house was not far off the main road, where sat a roadside cafe called the Snack Shack. Blacks were served in the back, and sometimes at the back door, a Dutch door where a black girl sat with the top open and the bottom closed as if she were standing behind a counter. My mother, heavily pregnant, would send me and my brother there at times for treats such as freshly roasted peanuts.

One day, the door was closed. I knocked, but the girl did not answer. I must have been determined to get whatever it was my brother and I had gone to get. The closed, unanswered door served only to disturb my four-and-a-half-year-old sense of the natural order and spur me to further action. With no idea I was doing anything wrong, I led my three-year-old brother around to the front door, walked through the cafe, and knocked on the inside door, which also was closed.

There are two reasons I’ve never forgotten this. One was the look on the faces of the people who watched as we walked through the cafe, a look for which I had no word at the time: astonishment. The other is what happened when I knocked on the inside door. The girl opened it, and even at four-and-a-half I had some understanding of why she had not answered the other door. With her in the back, looking at us with a grin on his face, was a teenage cousin of mine.

Those four students from North Carolina A&T helped create a world where the students from Anacostia High do not have to confront overt bigotry. They have different challenges, and we’ll see if what happened on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro will move some to act. As for me, I’m happy having learned over the years that an adage has resonance when one has lived the words. So it is with the ones about bliss and ignorance, babes and fools.