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HILLSBOROUGH -- Odessa Johnson remembers a time when the county seat was neither inclusive nor willing to yield easily to the march for civil rights.
"I was in part of that, to integrate, and so many things I had to go through," said Johnson, now living in Greensboro with her husband, Cedar Grove native James C. Johnson.
He was among the N.C. A&T students who staged the February 1960 F.W. Woolworths lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro and now is on the sit-in movement board for the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro.
Sitting near her husband in the sanctuary of Mt. Bright Baptist Church on Monday afternoon following a commemorative march through Hillsborough that culminated with a series of speeches, rousing gospel music from the MLK Community Choir and an offering for the people of earthquake-devastated Haiti, Odessa Johnson remembered how race permeated even the simplest of human transactions in the last century.
"If I go to a store to purchase clothes, I could be standing in line to pay, but if they'd see a white person come in the door they wouldn't even wait on me," she said. "I might have to wait two or three hours to buy what I wanted."
And she recalled what a typical bus ride might be like from Hillsborough to Durham.
"Riding the bus, they had about two seats in the back for blacks," she said. "We had to stand. That was here in Hillsborough."
One day, she said, recounting an experience with a nasty bus driver, "I sat down on a seat and he made me get up," even though there were many vacant seats. "It seemed like he was driving the bus as rough as he could to throw me around." When she arrived in Durham, aching and tired from the jostling, she went to a cafeteria to order a hot dog and sat down to wait. The manager ordered her out of the seat. More typically, she said, food was ordered out of a window at the back of a restaurant.
"Things are so much better today," Odessa Johnson said. "I'm so thankful for the civil rights movement."
Indeed, those themes played out over and over in remarks by speaker after speaker.
"It ain't always been like this. It ain't always been this way," the Rev. Derric A Gregory Sr., senior pastor of Mt. Bright Baptist Church, told the standing-room crowd of hundreds huddled in his church.
"So get on your feet," an animated Gregory implored them, to thank God and those who paved the way for social justice. "We about to have church up in here. We want to get spiritually crunk, as the young people say."
"I'm not here to talk about 'Free at last, free at last,' or 'I have a dream,'" said Jamal Pittman, an Orange High School student, co-winner of the Northern Orange MLK Commemorative Committee Oratorical Contest and grandson of the Johnsons.
"We're living in a time when the color of our skin can no longer be an excuse for our failures," Pittman said. "What have you done to make Dr. King's dream become a reality?"
"We must stand and say 'Yes, we can,'" said Channing Scott of Orange Cross Roads Baptist Church, who shared the oratorical contest prize for high school contestants with Pittman. "Stop looking for a handout and start giving a hand up."
Involvement in community life and government decision-making is vital, and should be a daily part of King's legacy, said the Rev. Gwen Jordan, president of the Norther Orange NAACP branch.
"The schools have become the pipeline to prison," Jordan told the audience. Jordan encouraged churches and individuals to attend school board meetings, get informed and take actions to ensure black children are receiving the tools and help they need to succeed.
And she took issue with a popular concept of why children don't fare well academically.
"They didn't slip through the cracks. We let them fall through the cracks," she said. "We need to examine ourselves physically, morally and spiritually" to help children to excel.
