Make Money With Internet Press Releases

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Making money through Internet press releases, web content and social media networking is the goal of authors and others looking to increase income.

Bigmama
Didn't Shop At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

Every month 14 billion online searches, generated by Internet press release submissions, and social media networking activity help me create a target audience and sell my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, and poises me for public speaking events and consulting contracts. I have learned by reading other posts, websites and articles how important it is to give your target audience numerous chances to link to pertinent information about me and my work posted on additional pages and websites. Get a good laptop for under four hundred dollars.and get started by purchasing or downloading press release software and templates.

What you want to do is give the target audience enough relevant links to clearly present the message in your press release. However, overloading a press release or online article with more links than necessary can send your target audience into too many different directions and lose them altogether. Frivolous linking can cause distraction on sites other than yours. Do not forget the importance of social media marketing.

Desk Organizer

Social media networking and marketing, a growing trend for moving our wares, have changed the world and the way the world sells products, services and books. This does not mean the world is going paperless any time soon. Going paperless would be ideal, but going paperless is more idealistic than realistic. Writers still have need for making quick hand-written lists. You will still need to organize your mind and your desk for ultimate productivity. The more attractive the organization system is the better I can tolerate having it sitting on my desk. 

Lets face it, there will probably always to a need for office supplies. Many clients, who contract with us for our Internet and computer skills, do not have Internet and computer skills. If prospective clients had Internet and computer skills, they would have less need to contract with independent writers and producers. Do not discourage these clients from using whatever means of communication they are comfortable using and be prepared as an independent contractor to organize some paper they may generate.

Computer Tablet
Virgin Mobile

More and more, writers and other professionals are using computer tablets, readers and other hand-held devices to organize. Some devices have built-in note taking software that is perfect for quick notes, reference lists and research on the Internet, which you can bookmark. There is a slew of computer tablets out there with more coming out everyday. Try one of the older models at a warehouse price to get the feel of the new technology before you do heavy investment. Or, use the built-in technology on new cell phones. 

Get free book publicity, public speaking engagements and consulting contracts by publicizing to target audiences and search engines what you have to offer.

However, book sales are not the only way for me to make money on the Internet, but book sales are certainly a good place for me to start, having written a book that I am proud to pitch. Sometimes it takes us awhile to realize what we already know. When it finally hit me that I am an author and a respected expert in my field, I realized I have more to offer than I previously credited to myself.

Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's was published by Texas A&M University Press. My affiliation with this publisher helped me to receive advantages, such as public speaking engagements; book signing events at bookstores and other locations nationwide; publicity on the publisher's website; reviews from online book sellers; feature articles in major newspapers and magazines; television exposure and interviews; publication in journals and anthologies; inclusion in reference books; collection in libraries all over the nation; and commissions to write articles for national magazines.

   

AAUP on C-Span's Book TV

As a result of the publication of my book, 125 internationally organized university press members in the Association of American University Presses  (AAUP) recognized my book for its value to understanding race relations in the United States.

Race relations, an important theme in my writing, is the subject of many articles on this Blog. I believe you must define your writing and use the definition as a model for working and also for illustrating to others how to define and use their favorite topics as career markers.

Recognition presents opportunities for additional publicity and press coverage through the many vehicles available to AAUP, including the organization's publications, newspapers, journals and network television. AAUP members include academic presses in the United States, District of Columbia, Canada, Belgium, China, Egypt, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan and The Netherlands.

I learned that I, too, had to do my share of publicizing my book, especially after the initial push by the publisher ended. After the honeymoon with my book was over and the publisher's attention had moved on to next season's books, I had to step in to create a new target audience to interest in my book. You can do the same thing even if your book was self-published or published as an eBook on the Internet.

The Internet levels the playing field if you can write and you do not mind learning some new writing skills that include Internet press releases. According to my college adviser, journalism professor and mentor, the late Skip Leabo, the ability to write allows a person to literally write his or her own ticket in life. When he said that back then, I didn't know what it meant. Now I take this to heart, in that, if I don't tell people in writing (good writing) about myself and my book, who will?

Like me, you have to get over the feeling that you are bragging when you write about yourself. Most well-raised people are too shy about making bold announcements about themselves, their books, their accomplishments, their knowledge and their dreams without the guilt of appearing arrogant or the feeling that no one cares. Well, through your Internet press releases, you have a method of making them care about who you are, what you do and how you can help them to achieve their goals.

Then and only then could I get down to work creating a serious public relations campaign for myself. For fees, there are numerous services that will create public relations campaigns, which include writing Internet profiles and press releases. This was not an option that I decided to consider. After all, writing press releases and creating public relations campaigns are services I could sell for a fee. Why should I purchase them?

I know if someone lured me into a strange location with a suggestion that I would receive free information, they'd better have more waiting for me than an empty bucket of promises. In the famous words of Rufus & Chaka Khan, when I get there, "Tell me something good!"

Okay, forget about that last part, the 'Tell me that love me, yeah' part.

I bet Chaka Khan didn't have any trouble bragging about her music.

For all of you who don't know who Rufus & Chaka Khan were: Rufus was an American funk band, from Chicago, Illinois; best known when they embraced the vocals of their lead singer, Chaka Khan in the 1970s, when funk--a fusion of soul, jazz and rhythm & blues--a danceable groove, was at its pinnacle. One of the signature hits by Rufus was "Tell Me Something Good."

"Get the Word Out"
About Yourself
About Your Book
About Your Knowledge
About Your Services

For now, let's concentrate on writing a great press release. The secret to writing successful Internet press releases is to fashion the writing to the needs of the target audience. The secret to the secret is to find out who comprises your target audience. That means you have to find out who they are, where they live, what they read, what they eat, what they do for fun. Get the idea?

There are studies on the web that can help you with the answers to your questions about your target audience. Find out as much as possible about those folks in order to create with your words an environment they will visit, return to and tell their friends to visit using the ever growing social media, created to be shared freely.

Hundreds more or start a group!

Pay-per-click Advertising? vs Cost-per-click Advertising?

Pay per click (PPC) is a model used on websites where advertisers pay the host each time their advertisement is clicked. The big three in this area are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. Cost per click (CPC) is another model.

RSS (really simple syndication) contains standard feeds to a website instead of links, formatted for frequently updated material, such as blogs, news, audio and video. Perhaps you have seen these chicklets or buttons on Blogs and website inviting you to subscribe to the feed. This is a convenient function to provide your visitors a way to keep tract of your updates without having to remember to check back.

Affiliate Programs? vs Associate Programs?

Ultimately, search engines determine if I get paid. The Internet presence created by my press releases must turn the target audience into sales, whether the sales are my books or sales of products through affiliate and associate programs. Affiliate programs or associate programs are agreements between online merchants and web hosts, in which the merchant pays the site host a commission for sending traffic through advertising links to merchants’ sites.

A good understanding of how you intend to make money on your Blog or website will help you to write Internet press releases about products and create a strategy to drive traffic to your site to encourage affiliate agreements and to sell your own products.

Below is a list and descriptions of SEO tools and services that I have located. Be sure to make your own tests to see which ones will suit your needs.

http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

This SEO Tools page has links to the best SEO Tools on the Internet and these tools will help you to optimize your website and move your search engine position higher.

http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html

The SEMToolBar is an attractive, easy-to-use toolbar that allows users access to statistics relating to online marketing campaigns. It provides users with powerful tools and information necessary for understanding and monitoring how sites of interest are seen by search engines and thus presented to search engine users. We have two versions available; one for Internet Explorer and one for Firefox.

http://www.seo.com/

Begin your understanding of SEO. This is a paid SEO service but the information on the site is free and useful.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/articles/art089.htm.
Combine the information in this article with that of other SEO information and enter the world of Internet press release writing.

http://joannaciolek.com/wordpress/top-6-seo-strategies-for-2010/

There is one certainty about search engine optimization (SEO) – the game is always changing. 2010 is the year of real-time, personalized results, growing importance of social, community and collaborative platforms and web mobility. We need to adapt our SEO strategies to stay ahead of the curve. If we cling to “normal” SEO, we stand no chance of survival.

SEO tools can generate lists of keywords to attract prospective browsers on the web to announcements in your Internet press release or to posts on your website or Blog. Some of the SEO keyword tools are free and will suggest other keywords to include in the headline and body of your press release for search engine optimization. If used properly, free optimization tools can be as effective an SEO tool as paid optimization services.

I have to remind you that you are writing for human readers as well as search engine readers. So, pay attention that the words you choose make sense to both. And proofread your writing carefully. Human readers will usually forgive small errors and typos due to your being human. But remember, numerous mistakes over and over will begin to test your credibility with your target audience and could cost you repeat visitors to your Blog or website. Search engines are not forgiving of typos. You can miss out on a lot of clicks if you key in misspelled words. Be sure to proofread the tags and labels that guide search engines to your press release.

Write concisely and clearly without writing down to your target audience. I try to make my sentences as understandable as possible, not overly dramatic with frivolous use of adjectives that add to the word count and not the quality.

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The History of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement

Modern Race Relations in America

 Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's by Sunny Nash

Sunny Nash

Sunny Nash author of Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, is an award-winning writer, photographer, producer and public speaker. Her work appears in the African American National Biography by Harvard and Oxford; African American West, A Century of Short Stories; Reflections in Black, A History of Black Photography 1840 - Present; Ancestry Magazine; Companion to Southern Literature; Black Genesis: A Resource Book for African-American Genealogy; African American Foodways; Southwestern American Literature Journal and other anthologies. Nash is listed in references: The Source: a guidebook to American genealogy; Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies; Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics; Ebony Magazine; Southern Exposure; Hidden Sources: Family History in Unlikely Places; and others.

Bigmama
Didn't Shop At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

Chosen by the Association of American University Presses as one of its essential books for understanding race relations in the United States, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press) by the award-winning author, Sunny Nash, is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center in New York and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida.

The book can be purchased from all major bookstores as well as the Republic of Texas Museum in Austin, operated by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, whose mission since 1891 has been to preserve Texas heritage and historic structures and landmarks around the state, such as the Alamo in San Antonio and stories like those by Sunny Nash.  


Buy Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

  

© 2011 Sunny Nash

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

www.sunnynash.blogspot.com  

~Thank You~

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Rosa Parks, Woolworth's Sit-ins & Jim Crow Laws

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Riding the waves of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Woolworth's sit-ins integrated lunch counters across the nation and helped to destroy Jim Crow laws.

Greensboro Four
Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain
Ezell Blair, Jr., David Richmond

Woolworth sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counters in 1960 led set off the most significant civil rights movement of twentieth century America, after Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King led Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, both of which sounded knell to Jim Crow laws.

Four well-dressed black college freshmen, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond, from segregated North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, known as the Greensboro Four, challenged Jim Crow when they sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and asked politely to be served, sparking similar protests and racial demonstrations across the nation in the south and the north.

Photo: Rosa Parks 
Montgomery Bus Boycott 1956

The Greensboro Four from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College protested in a similar  style to that of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the style later perfected by the non-violent protest style of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the streets of the Deep South that led up to his I Have A Dream Speech. Non-violent protest methods, taught to those who would participate, were rehearsed and scripted so that tempers would be kept in line and escalation of violence would be one sided to highlight hatred directed toward innocent people marching or sitting for their rights. This non-violent style of protest was designed to be captured by a new broadcast medium, called television, much more effective than sound-only radio. 

Greensboro Four
Lunch Counter  Sit-in

The young college freshmen, who had earned the deserving title of the Greensboro Four, were refused service at the lunch counter because Woolworth 's headquarters had decreed that the company policy was “to abide by local custom.” The persistence of the four male students every day following that first day caused other students, including female and white students, to join them. As news spread over the nation, similar actions were repeated in other cities across America, bringing down the old Jim Crow laws  that represented segregation and overt discrimination against African Americans and other non-white people.

Offering an unusually intimate portrait of four men whose moral courage at ages 17 and 18 not only changed public accommodation laws in North Carolina but also served as a blueprint for non-violent protests throughout the 1960s, FEBRUARY ONE: The Story of the Greensboro Four reveals how these idealistic college students became friends and inspired one another to stage the sit-in, and how the burden of history has impacted their lives ever since. 



Signs of the Time: Colored Served in Rear

At the time that the protest at Woolworth's in Greensboro was taking place in 1960, it was five months before my eleventh birthday. Five years earlier, I remember my mother talking about Rosa Parks and showing me pictures of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in a magazine. I had no real idea what I was looking at six years old. But I did understand the signs that read Colored Served in Rear.

Brown vs. Board of Education
of Topeka: A Brief History
with Documents
(Google Affiliate Ad)

That was one year after Brown v. the Board of Education. There was a lot going on in race relations back then and my mother kept up with all of it in magazines and newspapers. She read a lot and taught me to read before I was supposed to be able to read. I wasn't in school yet and I didn't attend kindergarten.

I even knew about the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. the Board of Education. That was a year before my mother enrolled me in first grade. She didn't didn't try hiding things from me even when I was little and she was trying figure out how Brown would affect me. I saw the pictures in the newspaper. My mother took black newspapers from other cities because she said our local paper didn't print anything about us unless it was bad. She needed to know whether I would have to go to a different school than the one she knew about. Brown didn't affect me. Schools remained segregated through my high school graduation.

Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that mandated the desegregation of U.S. schools, is popularly seen as a hallmark of American justice. But author and professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego,  Peter Irons, surveys recent U.S. history to reveal a quite different picture: many states have found ways to delay implementation of, or totally evade, the ruling. .

In 1955 and 1956, the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought Alabama buses to a halt. I was in first grade when I heard my teachers whispering about a woman named Rosa Parks who had refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus and started the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Young Rosa Parks & Martin Luther King
Mugshots after Arrests
Montgomery Bus Boycott

At 10 years old, I was very aware of the treatment of black people in stores, movies and other private and public places. In fact, before I went to the first grade, my grandmother taught me to read 'white only' and 'colored' before I had learned to read any other words. When I did attend school, they were segregated. I could see as we passed in the car that those schools for white students were bigger, and better constructed and landscaped than the schools for black students. But I was also aware of the changes taking place.

We were never issued new text books. The books delivered to my schools were hand-me-down books from the white schools. Most of the books had been used to a frayed condition and had been deliberately defaced, I believed, because of the defamatory words written in the margins. My family, especially my grandmother, and my teachers, many of whom were descendants of former slaves, encouraged me to erase what I could from the margins of the defaced textbooks and ignore the rest, assuring me that it was the information printed inside the book that mattered.

   

Post-Civil War Black School
Virginia 1900s

Although my elementary school was not as roomy, comfortable or well equipped as their schools, I believe my education rivaled any of its day, black and white. The reason I say that is because, years later, I graduated from a large, white university and had no trouble with the course work. One of my professors told me early on I should leave. "Your education could not possibly have prepared you for university work," he said. Fortunately, I didn't listen. As a matter of fact, I never listened to anyone who told me I wouldn't make it there.

Integration after 1954 Brown Decision

Promise of Justice: 
Essays on Brown V. Board 
of Education by Stewart, 
(Google Affiliate Ad)

Finally, everyone got used to seeing me around and left me alone about it, really alone. No one wanted  me in their study group until they learned that I was making A's and then a lot of people wanted me in their study groups. No thanks.

Somehow, I never took it personally, a skill I learned from my grandmother. "Keep your emotions out of the matter," Bigmama would say when I complained about something. "Getting emotional takes you out of control." So, when I was in college with all those white students who were supposed to know so much than me, I concentrated on getting the education, the grades and my degree.

I'm happy I didn't make a huge stink of every slight I perceived against me. Having lived in a segregated and oppressive society, it would have been natural for me to consider hateful-sounding things to be hateful. But it bored me to try and figure out the meaning of every breath uttered from every mouth around me. Sometimes slights are real, but most often people are a lot like me--not spending much time thinking about anything but themselves, their families, their problems, their own lives and how they are going to get from here to there. Ignoring and redefining perceived slights frees the mind to move ahead in life. This is true for everyone, black or white, who may have an insecurity of some kind. And believe me, when I graduated from college, I left a string of insecure people behind, both professors who warned me to leave and white students I had out-performed.

All-Black Elementary School
Tennessee 1940s
Library of Congress

The problem with education for black students in the past in most parts of the United States during the pre-civil rights era is that the education reserved by black students in other parts of the nation sometimes did not measure up to the education of their white counterparts. When I was a child, I knew inferior education for black students had been true throughout history since Reconstruction after the Civil War. In rural areas, especially in the south but not exclusive to the south, poor education meant keeping future opportunities inaccessible for the nation's pool of cheap labor.

Mississippi Plantation 
Cotton Pickers  
Library of Congress

If these people were led to believe they had no opportunity and had no hope of it, maybe they would expect no opportunity, would adapt to their condition and reach for no higher goals.  In the minds of the ruling class, poor education and oppression were enough to keep many African Americans, poor white Americans and Mexican Americans in their places down on the farm, which kept them from adding to the competition growing in response to the influx of European and other immigrants into the nation's already crowded urban workforce. One method of keeping the rural population rural and out of the cities was to create a system of virtual bondage through sharecropping agreements, a method introduced immediately after the Civil War, but not restricted to former slaves. By the 1930s, during the Great Depression, there were nearly two million sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the rural South--black, white and brown--who experienced pseudo slavery, in that, they were imprisoned on large farms by commonly used unfair bookkeeping practices by their landlords.

 Custom Search it for yourself.

White Sharecroppers 1930s
Photo by Dorothea Lange
Library of Congress

You Have Seen Their Faces 
by Caldwell, Erskine/ Bourke-White, 
Margaret (Google Affiliate Ad)

After the Civil War, former slaves rushing from plantations to test freedom caused a shortage of farm workers and left vacant slave quarters that white sharecroppers filled. The sharecropping system gave sharecroppers shelter, sometimes in former slave quarters, mules, access to land, seed to raise a crop, usually cotton in the South, and farm store credit, leading to insurmountable debt. Landowners got a share and sharecroppers received a share against their debt. In some instances, sharecropping families remained in arrangements into the 1960s civil rights era when lands were abandoned and sold.

Generations of conditioning by tyrannical lords of an uncivilized social order set up a framework for a continued system of labor control and suppression of fair earnings. When people's livelihoods are kept at a minimum with no increases ever, then it would be easy for American society to enter an insiders' agreement, for the good of the rest, to keep certain people down on the farm working as sharecroppers and tenant farmers for less than subsistence wages, accepting the menial lifestyle and being imprisoned on the farms by dishonest bookkeeping. However, the agreement is good only as long as everyone involved allows the framework to remain in place.

Women Joined the Greensboro
Woolworth's Sit-ins
and Sit-ins around the Nation
Library of Congress

Oppressed black Americans, were labeled by the color of their skin. 

Oppressed whites could simply walk away from their oppression, not having been labeled by the color of their skin. However, black people had inherited hope for a better life from former slaves and the children of former slaves who had lived through the unimaginable and passed on the desire to rise to me and others like the Greensboro Four, who sat down at the segregated  Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960. Because Brown v. the Board of Education decision in 1954 had ended segregation put into place in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson, the Woolworth's sit-ins and demonstrations were not just about being served a meal. Among the issues being protested wholesale also included segregation of facilities and inferior education. As good as my education may have been when I was in elementary school in 1960, it did not guarantee that I would get a good job at the end of high school, even if I went on to college.

The most professional position I could train for at that time was schoolteacher."And be glad to get it," the old timers would say. Or I could train to serve my community in some capacity such as a hairdresser, barber or midwife. Other African Americans owned businesses such as shoeshine benches, clothing stores, restaurants, grocery stores, nursery schools, insurance companies, funeral homes, clothes cleaners or they were preachers.

Black Southern Family 1940s
In Front of Their Home
Library of Congress

A good income was still out of reach for African Americans when I was still in school, although, that did not stop the hard-working people in African American neighborhoods from enjoying good lives. There seemed to be a different value system in place then, a value system that included raising children who had no trouble knowing right from wrong, helping people in need and growing a nice vegetable garden. Everyone had a nice vegetable garden and we knew exactly what we were eating.

African Americans and those whites who sympathized with the plight of the descendants of former American slaves became weary of waiting for things to be different for so many people who had waited so long. There had been the Brown Decision in 1954 and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks. The wait was coming to an end as national media coverage indicated big changes on the horizon. Below, see a video of historical development that came from the Woolworth's sit-ins, including film of civil rights marchers and pictures of the events during the protest.

Segregation was a way of life until Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King found a vehicle, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to change that way of life.

That's why so many whites joined in the demonstrations. Others were afraid to show their change of heart for fear of being ostracized by their own communities. I'm not saying everyone has changed and we are all living happily without prejudice ever after. I am saying that we have come a long way. And I recognize that and I am happy about that. But we must go the rest of the journey in all human relations, including those having to do with race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, physical ability and economic status.

Allan Preyer III

Allan Preyer III, white Greensboro, resident, a seven-year-old in 1960 during Woolworth's protests. He wrote in Sit-ins: A Father's Example,' in NewsRecord.com, “My father was no hero of the civil rights movement. He was simply a representative of his generation of white Americans, prompted to examine his attitude toward race in America by circumstances, beginning with witnessing events on February 1, 1960, in Greensboro. Like many, his evolution of thought was sometimes bold, sometimes reluctant, and never fully free of the conditioning of his youth," Preyer said. "But something about my vicarious participation in my father's experience opened my young eyes to the generation of everyday heroes around me: the young African American girl who eased shyly into my fourth-grade classroom, integrating my public school; the young African American boy who first integrated my previously all-white boarding school; and literally thousands of others who broached hurdles less recognized than the Woolworth's lunch counter.”

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When I wrote my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, there was no FaceBook, which requires precautions against political correctness. because communications one key stroke away from insulting someone.

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Communications have changed and are light years ahead of the tools I used writing my book and columns on a personal computer. I had no idea how easy it would become to inflict  political incorrectness.

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Also join me on Huffington Post for my comments and discussions on civil rights, race relations, politics, style, entertainment and other pressing issues of the day.

Woolworth's Five & Dime 1890

Frank Winfield Woolworth started Woolworth’s in 1878 with a $300 loan, becoming the owner of one of the nation’s largest retail chains through a “five and dime” concept, changing forever how Americans shop. However, when the storekeeper opened his first store, the tight grip of Jim Crow was firmly around the neck of the United States and it is no wonder that his store and most other facilities in the nation were segregated for nearly 100 years to come.


Raleigh, North Carolina

From Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, the non-violent movement spread to other cities in North Carolina and then across the nation and challenged segregation in the United States. Many of the demonstrators who affected the demise of the Jim Crow  system were white students, who sat at lunch counters, marched in the streets and were arrested alongside black students protesting separate but equal. Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States Constitutional law justifying a system of segregation of services, facilities and public accommodations by race, as long as the accommodations for each group remained equal.

My grandmother, Bigmama, whom I write about in my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, did not shop at Woolworth’s for a couple of reasons. Bigmama didn’t trust the quality of anything that cost a nickel or a dime and she didn’t like the idea that she, as a woman of part Native American and African American heritage, didn’t have full access to everything in the store available to other customers.

International Civil Rights
Center & Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

The last Woolworth's closed in 1997. Some people in audiences I spoke to blamed my book. I assure you Woolworth's closing had more to do with other discount stores than my book. Competition from retail outlets like Kmart, Wal-Mart and Target, which all made their appearances in 1962, the same year that Woolworth’s began expanding, killed Woolworth’s, not my book.

Chosen by the Association of American University Presses as one of its essential books for understanding race relations in the United States, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s (Texas A&M University Press) is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center in New York and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida.

Sign of the Times: Positively No Beer Sold to Indians

Between 1876 and 1965, Jim Crow laws legalized segregation of all public and private facilities and services and blatant discrimination against African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Mexican Americans in the United States. Taking its name from a stage show character played by whites in black face, Jim Crow characters entertained white audiences and Jim Crow laws grew into a body of black codes applied against former slaves and other non-white Americans and their offspring well into the twentieth century. Native Americans are the most harshly affected by institutionalized racism, according to Worldwatch Institute, which notes that "317 reservations are threatened by environmental hazards. While formal equality has been legally granted, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders remain among the most economically disadvantaged groups in the country, and suffer from high levels of alcoholism and suicide."

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Bigmama Didn't
Shop At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash


This is an excerpt from an essay in my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, “My Grandmother’s Sit-in,” in which Bigmama and I went to visit a relative in the Navasota (Texas) hospital: Afraid that my grandmother and I would be arrested or worse, my blood ran cold sitting under the “White Only” sign. I was proud and ashamed at the same time but too terrified to look up and see other people watching us.

“I was about your age when the Supreme Court used the railroad to legalize what they called ‘separate but equal,’” Bigmama said. “It was 1896. Plessy v. Ferguson made things separate, but it sure didn’t make them equal.”

Bigmama shifted in her chair and whispered, “All Mr. Plessy wanted was a first-class train ticket. Well, he could spend first-class money on a first-class ticket, but Jim Crow said he couldn’t put his black behind in a first-class seat.”

“Who’s Jim Crow?” I asked.

Jim Crow Minstrel Character
Black Face Post Card

“A minstrel show character with a shiny black painted face and big white lips,” she said, glancing up at the sign. “Two nations under God, one ‘white only’ and the other one ‘colored.’ They wrote laws to keep us from using their restrooms, drinking from their water fountains, trying on clothes in a store, eating with them, going to school with them, marrying them and being buried under the same dirt with them.”

“Was Jim Crow before or after the South lost their war?” I asked softly, hardly breathing.

"The North may have won the Civil War in the history books, but the South didn’t lose,” whispered Bigmama, smiling with a frown between her eyes as she often did. “The North gave the South everything the South was fighting to keep; because the North, the South, the West and the East all wanted the same thing—us in a low place.” My grandmother got up, smoothed her coat, and politely nodded to the other stunned hospital guests. “I’m going now,” she said. “I never stay long where I’m not wanted.”

Buy:  Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s by Sunny Nash

Sunny Nash

Chosen by the Association of American University Presses as one of its essential books for understanding race relations in the United States, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press) by the award-winning author, Sunny Nash, is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center in New York and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida.

Buy:  Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s

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