Off Campus — Into Movement

The Sit-Ins I'm going to sit at the welcome table...

February 1st, 1960, Greensboro NC. Four students from North Carolina A&T sit down at a "whites-only" Woolworth's lunch counter and ask to be served. This action by David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil ignites a wave of student sit-ins and protests that flash like fire across the South. A fire for justice that no amount of beatings, jails, or firehoses, can extinguish. Within days sit-ins are occurring in dozens of Southern towns, and in the North supporting picket-lines spring up at Woolworth and Kress stores from New York to San Francisco.

Protests continue outside the segregated Mayfair Cafeteria, Greensboro, 1960.

In Harlem and many other northern communities, Movement supporters picket Woolworths and other chain stores to support the southern sit-ins.

 

Nashville, February, 1960. Just days after the Greensboro sit-in, students from American Baptist Theologic Seminary, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee A&I begin confronting segregation in Nashville TN. They politely sit at "whites-only" lunch counters and restaurants. They are met with violence, brutality, and arrest. Hundreds are jailed, and thousands march in protests that continue for years. Nashville Student Movement leader Diane Nash.

Rather than serve people of color, this Walgreen's lunch-counter closes "in the interests of public safety." Other cafes and lunch- counters call the cops to arrest Blacks for the crime of ordering a cup of coffee in defiance of the segregation laws.

John Lewis, O.D. Hunt, and Dennis Gregory Foote, after their arrest at a downtown lunch counter.

Students busted for protesting segregation fill the Nashville jail to overflowing.

Fisk University student Jean Wynona Fleming behind bars in the Nashville jail.

Gasping for breath, James Bevel and John Lewis are trapped inside a Nashville restaurant filled with insecticide gas when the manager turns on a fumigating machine to disrupt a sit-in.

C.T. Vivian, Diane Nash, and Bernard LaFayette leading protest march in Nashville, 1960. With Curtis Murphy they confront the Mayor on the Courthouse steps.

Slowly, — too slowly, — victories are won at great cost. Matthew Walker, Peggy Alexander, Diane Nash and Stanley Hemphill eat lunch at the previously segregated counter of the Post House Restaurant in the Greyhound bus terminal. This is the first time since the start of the sit-ins that Blacks are served at previously all-white counters in Nashville.

1960 - 1963
Sit-ins, swim-ins, read-ins, pray-ins, marches, and other protests erupt across the South at segregated restaurants, swimming pools, libraries, churches...

Peoples Drug store, Arlington, VA. 1960. They closed the lunch counter rather than serve Black students.

Farmville, VA. 1963. Student sit-ins being dragged away from the College Shoppe Restaurant.

Richmond, VA. 1960.

Orangeburg, SC. March, 1960

Kress 5&10 store removes stools to prevent students from integrating the lunch counter with a sit-in, 1960. Orangeburg, SC.

More than 1,000 students march in support of anti-segregation, sit-ins at downtown lunch counters.

Police attack the marchers with tear gas and fire hoses, and force them into the "stockade."

Woolworth sit-in, Jackson, MS. May 28, 1963

"This was the most violently attacked sit-in during the 1960s and is the most publicized. A huge mob gathered, with open police support while the three of us sat there for three hours. I was attacked with fists, brass knuckles and the broken portions of glass sugar containers, and was burned with cigarettes. I'm covered with blood and we were all covered by salt, sugar, mustard, and various other things. Seated, left to right, are myself, Joan Trumpauer (now Mulholland), and Anne Moody (Coming of Age in Mississippi). Other sit-ins — some in a split-off section and some briefly with our heavily targeted part — were Memphis Norman (himself brutally struck and kicked unconscious), Pearlena Lewis, Lois Chaffee, James Beard, George Raymond, and Walter Williams. ) The response by Jackson's Black community to the sit-in and its violence was tremendously positive. The mass meeting that night was the biggest yet — despite the hordes of hostile city and state police and sheriffs' forces surrounding the church: close to a thousand people attended. Our initial picket demonstration on Capitol Street on December 12, 1962, had launched the Jackson Boycott Movement, — and our Woolworth Sit-In now transposed the Boycott Movement into the massive Jackson Movement." John Salter (Hunter Bear). (Movement activist Rev. Ed King standing behind sit-ins in 2nd photo.)

The Freedom Rides

If you miss me at the back of the bus....

 

Organized by CORE, two integrated groups of Freedom Riders enter Alabama on May 14, 1961. One bus is ambushed and burned by a racist mob outside of Anniston, the other arrives in Birmingham where another mob brutally assaults the riders. Students from the Nashville Movement take up the ride in Birmingham. When the buses pull into Montgomery the riders are viciously attacked by yet another waiting mob. Reporters and photographers are also brutally assaulted and their cameras smashed to prevent the rest of America from seeing pictures of the Klan assault on non-violent young men and women.

The next night Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy lead a mass-meeting in Abernathy's First Baptist Church to honor the riders. As darkness falls, a huge mob of white racists, numbering in the thousands, surrounds the church in a long bloody night of violence and terror. Trapped inside the Church, the Freedom Riders and their supporters wait with steadfast courage for the dawn.

Yale Chaplin William Sloan Coffin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Bernard Lee at the "white only" lunch counter in the Montgomery Trailways terminal just before they are arrested.

National public opinion finally forces President Kennedy to call out the National Guard to protect the riders on their journey from Montgomery to Jackson Mississippi.

Nashville Movement leaders Rip Patton (left) and Bernard LaFayette (aisle) with Jim Lawson seated behind them on the bus headed into Jackson MS with National Guard troops standing guard.

The Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson for violating local segregation laws. They are sentenced to Parchman State Prison, where they are beaten and abused.   But more Freedom Riders follow, coming down from the North and rolling in from the West. All are imprisoned. More than 300 are jailed in Jackson alone. Similar arrests occur in other Southern towns. The rides only end when public outcry forces the Kennedy administration to enforce the law prohibiting segregation in interstate commerce.

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