'You don't need permission to stand up': Journalist Roland Martin speaks at N.C. A&T's Feb. 1 commemoration

GREENSBORO — Roland Martin, the journalist, has lots of opinions.

Here's one he shared Friday at N.C. A&T: He abhors it when he hears young people asking when older folks will hand over the baton and get out of their way.

Here's another opinion, offered on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the start of the downtown Greensboro sit-ins: "You don't need permission to stand up."

Martin was the keynote speaker Friday morning at the Sit-In Anniversary Breakfast Celebration. Several hundred people gathered at the Alumni-Foundation Event Center on campus to eat a buffet breakfast, hear A&T's Fellowship Gospel Choir perform "Lift Every Voice and Sing" and listen to Martin's talk.

Though it was a round-number anniversary — the first downtown Greensboro sit-in was 60 years ago on Feb. 1, 1960 — the A&T program stuck to its usual script. It was followed by the customary wreath-laying at the February One monument and a panel discussion.

Friday's event commemorated the first sit-ins at Greensboro's segregated Woolworth lunch counter and celebrated the efforts of four leaders, who were freshman in early 1960 at what was then called Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina. The two living members of the Greensboro A&T Four, Joseph McNeil and Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.), were both on campus Friday. David Richmond Jr., who died in 1990, and Franklin McCain, who died in 2014, were represented by their families.

The keynote speaker was Martin, a book author, former newspaper editor and publisher and TV and radio commentator on CNN and several other networks. In late 2018, he gave up those regular network roles and launched his own online show, #RolandMartinUnfiltered. The show runs for an hour or two each day on YouTube and covers lots of different issues — news, politics sports, culture, entertainment — from an African American perspective.

Martin is both host and managing editor of the web show. Those roles give him complete control over content, Martin said, something he lacked in his other TV roles.

"I don't ask somebody else, 'Can I?'" Martin said. "I ask myself. ... Were it not for black-owned media, we would not have had platforms that were covering (black) issues when daily newspapers would not even put us in the paper."

Serious coverage of major social and political issues that affect black Americans is crucial these days, said Martin, a former newspaper reporter who later ran three different black newspapers.

"No group of people can survive if the only thing being covered is what some entertainer is saying or doing or wearing," Martin said to applause.

Martin spoke for nearly an hour Friday and touched on politics, race, civil rights, voting, judicial appointments, the nation's changing demographics and patriotism. He hardly sounded like someone ready to pass the baton to a younger generation of journalists.

In many places, Martin said, elders get great respect and reverence. "We play a dangerous game," he said, when a new generation tries to push past older people who have valuable knowledge and experience and tenacity. But elders, he said, shouldn't squash the energy and passion of a younger generation.

"The real deal is, if you want to do this thing properly, both forces must be operating at the exact same time going to the same destination," Martin said.

Martin noted the Greensboro Four didn't ask the school or their parents if they could sit down and demand to be served at a whites-only lunch counter. The next generation of black leaders shouldn't seek permission either to make a difference, he said.

"Some folk understand that you have to do some things because it is right, and it is just and not about whether or not I'm able to get a job later," Martin said.

No matter who's leading, Martin said, the black struggle will continue.

"Every single thing that African Americans have gotten in this country has been because we've had to raise hell, protest, agitate, push, prod, let folks know that we're not going to back down," Martin said as the crowd clapped. "That is simply who we are."