April 1, 1960
Greensboro, North Carolina
The Black students who sat down at the whites-only lunch counter two months earlier had made a big splash. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. kept tabs on what was happening there as a great wave gathered force.
The morning after Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond made their stand, twenty-seven students took seats at the same five-and-dime in Greensboro, North Carolina. Their food orders were also ignored.
The protest grew. Five days after it began, more than one thousand students arrived at Woolworth on a busy Saturday. Those who could not sit at the counter formed picket lines outside.
They used nonviolent resistance to draw the nation’s attention to segregation and to build support for their cause. The lunch-counter movement had quickly spread beyond Greensboro. Now, by April, young Black people were sitting down at segregated eateries in fifty-five cities in thirteen southern states. As the sit-ins continued, more than forty were arrested—mostly for misdemeanors like trespassing, disorderly conduct, or disturbing the peace, and national media coverage brought the civil rights movement into living rooms all over America.
Meanwhile, the scope of the protests had widened. It was no longer just about integrating lunch counters. Demonstrators aimed to end all racial segregation in public places. In Petersburg, Virginia, more than one hundred students entered the public library through the “Whites only” front door and took all the open chairs. When the library reopened days later, a smaller group came back to do the same; eleven were arrested.
But as the “electrifying movement” took hold, King saw the opposition was growing louder—and violence was a language it spoke fluently. Protesters in many places were confronted by whites shouting racial slurs. They were often harassed and assaulted. In many places, the situation grew tense and dangerous. But the majority of the protesters knew they had to stay in control—and nonviolent—for the movement to succeed. They faced police guns, tear gas, arrest, and jail sentences. Even in the face of danger, these protesters continued to sit down and demand equal service.
The new activism was “initiated, fed and sustained by students,” King told supporters a week later at Spelman College in Atlanta. “This struggle we are going through today is not to benefit the Negro race only, but will save the souls of America in the sight of other nations of the world.”
When King spoke, Blacks and many whites listened. Black leaders stood up against segregation in the United States, but King was the face of the civil rights movement. He was America’s preeminent advocate of nonviolence and social justice. Despite threats to his life, he kept pushing for integration and equal rights.
King’s rise was meteoric. Five years earlier, he was a little-known pastor at a Montgomery, Alabama, Baptist church. Events beyond his control thrust him into the national spotlight, while his upbringing and faith helped him navigate the sudden fame and the heavy responsibility.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, King was raised in a home centered around Southern Black Protestantism. His father and grandfather were Baptist preachers. His great-grandfather, brother, and uncle were all pastors. So, it only made sense that someday he’d follow in their footsteps.
His father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., was the successful pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and his mother, Alberta, provided a loving family environment for their three children.
But they couldn’t shield young Martin and his siblings from the blatant racism that permeated Atlanta and the entire South. Years later, King Jr. would recall a trip with his father to a downtown shoe store.
When they walked inside, they sat in empty seats at the front of the store. And that’s when a young white clerk approached and murmured politely, “I’ll be happy to wait on you if you’ll just move to those seats in the rear.”
His father replied, “There’s nothing wrong with these seats. We’re quite comfortable here.”
“Sorry,” she said, “but you’ll have to move.”
By now, his father—the son of a sharecropper—was furious. “We’ll either buy shoes sitting here, or we won’t buy shoes at all.”
King Sr. could tell the clerk wouldn’t help them. So, he grabbed his son’s hand and stormed out the door. King could still remember walking down the street with his father as he muttered, “I don’t care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.”
Young Martin resented segregation, calling it a “grave injustice.” But his parents’ love guided him through difficult years and made him optimistic about the future.
America’s racial problems “were a social condition rather than a natural order.” She could protect her children by instilling in them a sense that they “must never allow it to make me feel inferior,” King wrote in his autobiography.
His family lived on Auburn Avenue, Atlanta’s bustling “Black Wall Street.” It was home to some of America’s largest and most prosperous Black businesses and churches in the years before the civil rights movement.
Even so, King felt keenly the prejudice then common in the South. King attended Morehouse College in 1944 as an early admission student when he was only fifteen. After graduation, he spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary near Chester, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white institution. There he encountered Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence and honed the speaking skills that later made him famous.
King was working on his doctorate at Boston University in 1952 when he met Coretta Scott, a native of Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory. A year later, they married.
In 1954, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, when he led a boycott that integrated the city’s buses. He capitalized on the success to help organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It gave him a base of operations throughout the South and provided him with a national pulpit.
King, his wife, and their four children had just moved to Atlanta, where he became co-pastor at his father’s church. But he devoted most of his time to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and civil rights, declaring that the “psychological moment has come when a concentrated drive against injustice can bring great, tangible gains.”
Meanwhile, the college students in Greensboro were putting King’s nonviolence principle to the test.
Joseph McNeil felt the admiration of some in the community but the anger of others. Still, they knew that if they fought back, they would give away the moral high ground. They leaned on one another and pushed forward.
What puzzled the Greensboro protesters was that many of the church leaders in the city—both Black and white—didn’t speak out right away against the injustice. They looked the other way, or didn’t take them seriously. Ezell Blair Jr. knew that many people “figured we were just four dumb black freshmen students out on some kind of prank.”
But they had teachers who instilled in them that you have to stand up for what’s right. The four young men met with Woolworth officials about how to resolve the issue. For McCain that was easy: Just integrate the lunch counter.
The businessmen tried to make it complicated. An attorney for the retail giant suggested the company build “a comfortable facility, but downstairs someplace, for Black folk to eat at.” The restaurant, he said, would be “as nice as, or, in fact, a little bit better than what the white people have there now.”
The protesters were insulted. The talks broke down.
King knew they needed help. The preacher called together a conference of college students from the North and South to discuss strategy. They formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Along with the Congress of Racial Equality, founded in 1942, they became the main grassroots organizers of future sit-ins, protests, and marches.
King urged students and activists to train people to fill the jails rather than post bond or pay fines. This tactic “may be the thing to awaken the dozing conscience of many of our white brothers.”
He called for whites to support the students. And he asked the government to do the same. King had hoped national politicians, including the presidential candidates, would express their support for the peaceful protests. Neither Kennedy nor Nixon had that kind of backbone—not with an election on the line.
The civil rights leader was disappointed, but he wasn’t surprised. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling outlawing segregation in public schools had drawn a backlash from southern Democratic leaders.
On the campaign trail, Kennedy didn’t mention segregation or civil rights for fear of losing southern support.
King wondered out loud just what Kennedy stood for. Why was he running for president? What motivated him? He offered JFK a chance to define himself, show his courage. Instead, Kennedy ran from the issue.
Kennedy admitted privately that he hadn’t known many Black people in his life. He was born into a privileged, wealthy Massachusetts family. He attended white schools and had few Black friends. The Navy was still segregated when he’d served in World War II.
Kennedy had spoken with Black people on the campaign trail, but they were often entertainers or athletes. He had never met Martin Luther King Jr., nor any other civil rights leader. It didn’t seem worth the risk.
In 1960, more than 85 percent of the U.S. population was white. A large percentage of Blacks had never voted. Many lived second-class lives in a nation that was supposed to be a beacon of liberty and democracy to the world.
Yet, Kennedy played both sides. At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, segregationist George Wallace escorted his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, to address the Alabama delegation.
John Temple Graves, a noted segregationist and national newspaper columnist for the Birmingham Post-Herald, praised JFK, calling him a better alternative to labor leader Walter Reuther or Vice President Richard Nixon. Graves wrote that Kennedy might be the “living antithesis of Earl Warren,” the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who penned the majority opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. In response, JFK sent Graves a thank-you note.
Even more telling, Kennedy in June 1959 invited segregationist Alabama governor John Patterson and his aide Sam Engelhardt Jr., the racist leader of a white supremacist group founded to combat integration, to breakfast at his Georgetown home. After the meeting, Patterson enthusiastically endorsed Kennedy’s presidential bid, outraging Black leaders.
At this point, Blacks felt more at ease with Republicans—the party of Abraham Lincoln. Eisenhower wasn’t perfect, but at least he had sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the Supreme Court ruling integrating public schools.
King knew he’d have to push politicians to do the right thing. He would call them out on their willful blindness and silence.
Maybe, at some point, they’d come around.