The Sit-InsI'm going to sit at the welcome table...
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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. |
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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. |
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Fisk University student Jean Wynona Fleming behind bars in the Nashville jail. |
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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. |
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Peoples Drug store, Arlington, VA. 1960. They closed the lunch counter rather than serve Black students. |
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Farmville, VA. 1963. Student sit-ins being dragged away from the College Shoppe Restaurant. |
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Kress 5&10 store removes stools to prevent students from integrating the lunch counter with a sit-in, 1960. Orangeburg, SC.
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More than 1,000 students march in support of anti-segregation, sit-ins at downtown lunch counters. |
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Police attack the marchers with tear gas and fire hoses, and force them into the "stockade." |
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If you miss me at the back of the bus.... |
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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. |
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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. |
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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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