TEN 

THE SIT-INS AND THE FOUNDING OF SNCC

KING’S FAREWELL APPEARANCE in Montgomery was on January 31, 1960. That same night, Joseph McNeil, a freshman at North Carolina A&T University, was returning to Greensboro. He entered the Greensboro bus station cafe and was told, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” McNeil returned to his dormitory room, where he discussed what had happened with three friends: Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond.

Three of them had been raised in Greensboro and attended Dudley High School; McNeil was from Wilmington, North Carolina. Each of the four remembered high school teachers who had instilled them with racial pride. Two of the four were active in the Greensboro NAACP youth chapter. One worked in the A&T library with Eula Hudgens, who had participated in the 1947 CORE/FOR Freedom Ride that had sent Bayard Rustin to the chain gang. All remembered the Montgomery bus boycott, one calling it “a catalyst. It started a whole lot of things rolling.”¹ Blair’s father was an NAACP activist. The younger Blair heard Martin Luther King when he spoke at his high school in 1955 and at Bennett College in Greensboro in 1958 and remembered being moved by a television documentary on Gandhi’s passive resistance. All of them held long conversations with Dr. George Simpkins, Greensboro NAACP president, and with Ralph Johns, a white store owner active in the NAACP. They were part of a protest community with deep roots in Greensboro’s past.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1

The four students entered the Greensboro Woolworth’s Department Store and, after buying school supplies, took seats at the segregated lunch counter. When they were refused service—by a Black waitress—Blair said, “I beg your pardon, but you just served us at [that] counter. Why can’t we be served at the [food] counter here?”²

“You are stupid, ignorant. You’re dumb!” the waitress said. “That’s why we can’t get anywhere today. You know you are supposed to eat at the other end.”³

The store’s manager tried to persuade them to leave, and when that failed, he told the employees to ignore them. The students said they would return the next day and every day until they were treated just like white customers.

McCain remembered, “We had the confidence of a Mack truck. I probably felt better that day than I’ve ever felt in my life. I felt as though I had gained my manhood.”

“I felt that I had powers within me, a superhuman strength that would come forward,” McNeil recalled.

When they left, they went by Dr. Simpkins’s home, telling him they planned to go back tomorrow. A Greensboro radio station broadcast a story about the sit-in; the campus was in an uproar when the four returned. People wanted to join in. They contacted student leaders and began to coordinate transportation for the next day and discuss how to impose discipline on future demonstrators.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2

They were joined by twenty-three A&T students and four young women from nearby Bennett College. Some of the men wore ROTC uniforms; others, coats and ties. The women wore dresses. All carried books and notebooks and used their time at the lunch counters to study. That night the Greensboro NAACP endorsed the students’ sit-in and voted to give them legal assistance.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3

Students took over sixty-three of the sixty-five seats in the store. A newly formed Student Executive Committee that included students from A&T and Bennett College set strategy and recruited new demonstrators. “We did an hour-by-hour job,” Richmond said. “We had students to take each other’s place at the counters. We had a carpool to transport everybody. We had a place where everybody would come and register for the whole week.”⁴ North Carolina newspapers picked up the story, and the Associated Press and United Press International carried it across the country.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4

Three white women from the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina joined the protest. The protest overflowed the Woolworth’s counter into S. H. Kress’s down the street. And, for the first time, white teenaged thugs filled both stores’ aisles and harassed the protesters.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5

More than three hundred students were part of the protest. Three white men were arrested, one for setting fire to a Black student’s coat as he sat at the lunch counter.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6

Hundreds of students, including the A&T football team, flooded downtown Greensboro. They were met by white gangs waving Confederate flags. Carrying small American flags, the football team formed a flying wedge that broke through the gang and allowed new demonstrators to replace those already sitting in.

“Who do you think you are?” one of the whites asked.

A football player replied: “We are the Union Army.”

Bomb scares closed both lunch counters. When the students marched back to campus chanting, “It’s all over! It’s all over!” the line they made was over two miles long.⁵

OF COURSE, IT was not over. The sit-in movement had only just begun. There had been sit-ins before. The Howard University NAACP had staged sit-ins at a Washington restaurant in 1943; there had been others sponsored by NAACP youth chapters in Kansas and North Carolina cities in the late 1950s. Suddenly one had caught fire, spreading from Greensboro through the Carolinas and into the Upper South.

The sit-in demonstrations, from Greensboro forward, provided a technique through which traditional patterns of white oppression could be attacked by ordinary people—not lawyers or ministers or social scientists. These were college students, most of them Southerners, the generation born during the Second World War, raised in segregation, educated at Black public schools and now attending Black colleges, knowing racism would frustrate the training they were receiving and would work to diminish the worth of their degrees. They had been frightened by Emmett Till’s murder, encouraged by the 1954 Brown decision, thrilled by the marching feet in Montgomery, uplifted by the rhetoric of Martin Luther King (at thirty years old in 1960, he was closer to the students’ age than the faraway figures of the civil rights establishment like Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Lester Granger), and given a strong dose of youthful courage by the Little Rock Nine. They were exposed to the movement for African independence, led by college-trained Africans only a few years older than they were, and the worldwide destruction of colonialism.

In 1952, a state of emergency was declared in Kenya following activity by freedom fighters called the Mau Mau, led by Jomo Kenyatta. In 1956, Sudan proclaimed its independence. Nasser became president of the United Arab Republic in 1958. In 1960, the Belgian Congo became independent. The future sit-inners attended college with Africans who chided their American classmates for their lack of aggression against American apartheid. “We are freeing our countries,” the Africans would say, “When will you be free in America?”

Following the Friday demonstrations, the Greensboro students agreed to a two-week cooling-off period. On Saturday, 1,600 students rallied at A&T and agreed to let negotiations proceed.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8

That morning, a single Black college student conducted Winston-Salem’s first sit-in; that afternoon, twenty-five others joined him. That same day, seventeen students from North Carolina College and four from Duke University staged a sit-in in Durham.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9

Sit-ins were held in Charlotte.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10

After a radio station in Raleigh announced that no sit-ins were planned there, forty-one students were arrested at Raleigh lunch counters. Students from Hampton Institute staged a sit-in in Hampton, Virginia, the first outside North Carolina since the movement started on February 1.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11

Sit-ins were held in High Point, North Carolina, and Portsmouth, Virginia, where police dogs were used to disperse crowds.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17

Seventy-six sit-in demonstrators were arrested in Nashville. James Lawson, a divinity student at Vanderbilt University and Southern field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, had been conducting nonviolence workshops for two years. The Nashville students—John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, and others—trained by Lawson would become stalwarts of the movement that young people like them were creating, day by day, across the South.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22

Thirty-three students were arrested in Richmond, and demonstrations began in Petersburg, Newport News, and Arlington, Virginia.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23

High school students sat in in Chattanooga; college students staged sit-ins in Knoxville, Memphis, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24

Sit-ins were held in Orangeburg, Sumpter, Columbia, and Rock Hill, South Carolina. In Montgomery, thirty-five students from Alabama State College sat in at the Montgomery County Courthouse snack shop. Alabama governor John Patterson ordered the president of the college to expel them. King spoke to a campus protest rally, where one thousand students pledged to quit school if anyone was expelled. Students from Texas Southern University sat in, in Houston; there were mass arrests of students in Marshall, Texas.

BETWEEN FEBRUARY 1960 and February 1962, thousands of lunch counters and other facilities in 150 Southern cities were integrated, either by nonviolent action or the threat of such action. Over seven thousand people eagerly went to jail, and over one hundred thousand people had actively participated in this new movement. Millions more were moved by mass media reports of the sit-ins.

WHAT THE SIT-INS MEANT

The sit-ins represented a tactical change from earlier boycotts and lawsuits, by their nature demanding and establishing equality at the same time. It was confrontational activity, creating an immediate contradiction for whites—between a new reality and the continuing myths upon which white fantasy rested. The region-wide inbred culture of white supremacy had long practiced automatic responses to Black transgressions against the color line, but the nonviolent nature of the sit-ins disarmed whites and rendered them impotent. The sit-ins challenged cherished beliefs most whites had embraced since birth and held dearly: that Blacks were satisfied with the Jim Crow system and had no desire to see it changed. These young people were clearly dissatisfied and unwilling to wait for any time to pass or hearts to change. They wanted action now!

College students were ideally situated to sponsor and spread the sit-in movement. They were young and had none of the responsibilities that come with maturity—a job, mortgage, car loan, or family. Many of them emerged from school networks such as fraternities and sororities, student governments, and other campus organizations. The sit-ins gave on-the-spot leadership training to a new, young generation and gave impetus to a new organization. The sit-ins struck at the notion expressed by whites in authority—mayors, governors, presidents—that racial troubles were caused by outsiders, by Northerners, by Communists, or the Supreme Court. These students were home-grown local products, raised, nurtured, and educated in the towns where they protested. There was not an outside agitator among them. The protests showed Blacks and whites that demonstrations by Blacks could be orderly and peaceful and skillfully organized, giving Black people a sense of their own power and ability in the face of overwhelming white power.

In the Black communities from whence these protests sprung, ancient conflicts between activists and accommodationists, between “go-slows” and “nows!” were exposed. The sit-ins upset traditional race relations in the South and upset the established way of negotiating racial progress: behind closed doors, through negotiations between powerful whites and Blacks often chosen by whites. They also upset the NAACP’s nearly unchallenged dominance as the single organization that fought for racial progress.

Although they targeted lunch counter segregation, they were about much, much more. A Howard University student wrote years later: “I still carry with me the feeling of those days—black people in motion against white supremacy. White people never gave the sit-ins that definition, probably because the thought of that frightens them. They always talked about the sit-ins in terms of lunch counters, and desegregation, and civil rights bills.”⁶ If the 1954 Brown decision had theoretically ended segregation through court action, the hostile reaction to Brown had paradoxically begun to tilt the movement toward greater activism and away from dependence on the courts.

When the sit-ins began, in 1960, Mahatma Gandhi had been dead for only twelve years. First Montgomery and then the sit-ins gave new life to Gandhi’s message. The sit-ins combined nonviolence and confrontation; for participants, they fused personal faith and social justice, peacefully demanding equality now, not from the courtroom or the pulpit but in the most public sphere, where everyone, Black and white, was witness.

Television had brought the sit-ins into American homes, as it had done with the Little Rock crisis in 1957. Ugly images of raging mobs threatening innocent schoolchildren and T-shirted thugs attacking suit-wearing college students brought naked racial hatred to new audiences. Even the segregationist editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch was dismayed— he called the white rowdies “a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black jacketed, grinning fit to kill.”⁷

And for many of those witnesses who were white, the sit-ins created a conflict between belief and reality, a conflict that could only be resolved in two ways—a further retreat into Negrophobia or an acknowledgment, however reluctant, of the justice of the sit-in students’ demands.

For the Southern white political leadership, the sit-ins called for an adjustment they had promised never to make, a reversal of deep-seated beliefs, an unexpected—and therefore all the more challenging—moral claim to extend fairness to everyone, not just to the racially favored caste. That the claim was cloaked in common Judeo-Christian principles made it all the more irresistible.

The sit-ins loosed a great moral energy, and their nonviolent nature confused and, in many cases, paralyzed the reaction. Moderate Southern whites whose previous silence had given sanction to the greatest brutality to punish real and imagined racial transgressions were moved by the sit-in students’ willingness to absorb jail and summary punishment.

The civil rights movement, as it had existed until February 1960, would never be the same.