[5 articles]
It's 50 years since the sit in that ignited the sixties
http://sb.city2.org/blogs/rflacks/blog_entries/1544-its-50-years-since-the-sit-in-that-ignited-the-sixties/blog_comments/new
by rflacks
February 04 2010
We're back from an extended trip--to Vietnam and Cambodia. I'll try
to report on that experience here in a few days. but just now I
wanted to take note of the fact that the 'first' lunch counter sit-in
occurred 50 years ago this week. It was the action by 4 black
students at North Carolina A & T on the afternoon of February 1, 1960
that I refer to. It wasn't really the first such action--small groups
of black and white activists had made similar forays in other
southern towns in prior years. But the Greensboro act was the one
that made history.
First of all, the fact that these students sat down at a segregated
lunch counter, ordered coffee, were refused and harassed--all this
appeared on TV. The next day they were joined by a couple of dozen
others, and within days lunch counters at five and dime stores across
the South were besieged by black kids ordering beverages in violation
of local law and/or custom. The structure of southern segregation
was made to crumble by this simple, everyday move of students' bodies
into banned space--a move covered in the world media.
These sit-ins were the spark that ignited the mass southern freedom
movement, for they were followed by similar moves into other banned
spaces: freedom riders on segregated buses, freedom swimmers in
segregated pools, freedom shoppers, freedom voters. Mass marches of
children that filled local jails or were dispersed by fire hoses and
snarling dogs and cattle prods. The vulnerability of segregation of
public facilities is that it can be broken by these simple acts of
bodily transgression. And it's the nature of mass movement that when
a powerfully policed institution is shown to be vulnerable, large
numbers of people see the chance to pour through the cracks even when
they risk jail and violent reprisal.
Due notice has been taken of the anniversary, most notably by the
conversion of the original lunch counter in Greensboro into a civil
rights museum. But not enough notice, I feel, given the
momentousness of the original happening.
Here's what deserves more recognition:
1. The four sit-inners acted on their own out of their own intense
conversations about how they could make a difference in the world.
And their act showed how a small number of people, acting creatively,
can make history--can short circuit the conventional circuits of
politicking. And their act showed the power of nom-violent direct
action when creatively directed.
2. Their act was magnified not only by TV but more importantly by a
web of social networks throughout the south that enabled the sit in
to be replicated hundreds of times by tens of thousands of young
people within a short time. Beneath the radar of mass media
attention, the black communities of the south had been constructing
any number of ways to connect and mobilize.
3. The sit-ins created a white student movement in parallel. Because
the sit-ins occurred in southern franchises of national chain stores,
many of us in northern cities and college towns could picket our
local branches of these chains. The sympathetic picketing of
Woolworths and Kresges was the occasion for socially concerned white
kids to meet each other--ad from these meetings the white student new
left was born.
4. it wasn't just the chance to meet but the moral imperative that
southern injustice placed on relatively privileged white students
that impelled such new commitment. And it ws the example, the
suffering and the apparent purity of the southern students that
inspired us further.
if there is any single act that made 'the sixties' possible--i.e.
that made it possible for a lot of young people to believe that the
world could be changed through our own self-action and creativity, it
was the sit-in in Greensboro on 2/1/60 that served.
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Group marks anniversary of Nashville sit-ins
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100214/NEWS01/2140342/Group+marks+anniversary+of+Nashville+sit-ins
February 14, 2010
Panelists observing Saturday's 50th anniversary of the sit-in
movement that would integrate Nashville's lunch counters remembered
the college students who led the protest.
"This nation owes a lot to Nashville and the students of Nashville,"
Rip Patton, one of those student demonstrators, said during a panel
discussion Friday.
"They went all throughout the nation, making people aware of the
movement and what was going on."
Many went on to become civil rights leaders across the South.
Fisk University student Diane Nash helped found the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
John Lewis, a student at American Baptist Theological Seminary, now
American Baptist College, was another founding member of SNCC, a
speaker at the 1963 March on Washington and a leader of the
Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches. He is now a Georgia congressman.
The Rev. James Lawson became a Methodist pastor in Memphis, where he
led the sanitation workers' strike that in 1968 brought the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. to town, where he was assassinated.
Lawson is now a distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. In
1959, he was a divinity student there who trained students at several
of Nashville's black colleges in nonviolent civil disobedience.
The students began sit-ins at downtown lunch counters on Feb. 13,
1960. That May, Nashville became the first major Southern city to
begin the desegregation of its public facilities.
Friday's session on the sit-ins was held at the First Amendment Center.
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Leaders mark 50th anniversary of Nashville sit-ins
http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3915&Itemid=199
by TRAVIS LOLLER
February 15, 2010
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) _ Civil rights leaders observing Saturday's
50th anniversary of the sit-in movement that would integrate
Nashville's lunch counters said that group of college students went
on to become civil rights leaders across the South.
``This nation owes a lot to Nashville and the students of
Nashville,'' Rip Patton, one of those student demonstrators, said
during a Friday panel discussion. ``They went all throughout the
nation making people aware of the movement and what was going on.''
Fisk University student Diane Nash went on to help found the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. John Lewis, a student at American
Baptist Theological Seminary, now American Baptist College, was
another founding member, a principle speaker at the 1963 March on
Washington and a leader of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights
marches. He is now a Georgia congressman.
The Rev. James Lawson became a Methodist pastor in Memphis, where he
led the sanitation workers' strike that in 1968 brought the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. to town, where he was assassinated.
Lawson is now a distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. In
1959, he was a divinity student there who began training other
students at several of Nashville's black colleges in nonviolent civil
disobedience.
After five or six months of training, the students began sit-ins at
Nashville's downtown lunch counters on Feb. 13, 1960. Over the next
two months, the sit-ins continued and a boycott of downtown
businesses began. Then early on April 19, a bomb damaged the home of
a black attorney who had supported the students. That day, a group of
at least 3,000 people gathered for a silent march to the plaza near
City Hall where they met Mayor Ben West.
In the ensuing dialogue, West admitted he thought segregation was
morally wrong and the lunch counters should be desegregated.
Negotiations with business owners followed over the next few weeks,
and on May 10, Nashville became the first major Southern city to
begin the desegregation of its public facilities, historian Linda
Wynn of the Tennessee Historical Commission said in an interview.
The success of Nashville's highly organized movement was both a model
and an inspiration to other cities, Wynn said.
``The story of Nashville's impact, I've not seen anywhere in writing
yet,'' Lawson said Friday. But the Freedom Rides would have ended
with the first group of beaten, demoralized riders who decided they
could not go on, if it had not been for the Nashville students.
The Freedom Rides were bus trips designed to challenge segregation in
areas of the deep South that were unwilling to accept a Supreme Court
ruling that found the segregation of interstate travel facilities _
such as bus station waiting areas, restrooms and restaurants _ to be illegal.
The first bus was stopped in Alabama, where the riders were badly
beaten and voted not to continue.
``Because of our emphasis on nonviolence, we knew the Freedom Rides
could not be stopped by the Klan and the white citizens movement,''
Lawson said.
John Siegenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, which
hosted the panel, and former reporter and editor at The Tennessean,
was working for Robert Kennedy when Nash called to say Nashville
students were organizing more Freedom Rides.
``I said, 'Please don't do this. You're going to get somebody
killed,''' Siegenthaler recalled. ``And she said, 'We signed our
wills last night.'''
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Participants Recall Civil Rights Sit-Ins
http://www.thesnaponline.com/local/local_story_042103633.html
February 11, 2010
In 1957 Virginia Williams and six other African Americans sat in the
"White Only" side of the Royal Ice Cream Company in Durham. After
refusing to leave, they were arrested on trespassing charges. The
sit-in took place nearly three years before the historic Greensboro
sit-in on Feb. 1, 1960, at the F.W. Woolworth store and sparked a
national Civil Rights movement.
On Saturday, Feb. 20, Williams and two other participants in 1960
sit-ins in Greensboro and Raleigh will share their stories at the
N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh. Joining Williams are Dr. Herman
Thomas, who organized student sit-ins that occurred in Greensboro
after Feb. 1, and Barbara Woodhouse, who was arrested during a
student protest at Raleigh's Cameron Village on Feb. 12, 1960. They
will take part in a panel discussion and a Q&A session following a
screening of the award-winning documentary "February One: The Story
of the Greensboro Four."Rebecca Cerese, filmmaker and producer of
"February One," will join the discussion. The program is from 3 to
4:30 p.m., and admission is free.
"February One" chronicles the events of Feb. 1, 1960, when four black
freshmen from the Agricultural and Technical College of North
Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University) sat down at a
whites-only lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. Their actions
served as a blueprint for other nonviolent civil rights protests
across the South and the nation.
More information about the panel participants follows.
Williams was the first person arrested during the protest at the
Durham ice-cream parlor on June 23, 1957. The young African Americans
planned the sit-in with Rev. Douglas Moore, pastor of Asbury Temple
Methodist Church. The protest led to a court cast testing the
legality of segregated facilities.
Thomas, a close friend and fellow student of the four freshmen who
participated in the Feb. 1 sit-in, coordinated thousands of
demonstrators for sit-ins in Greensboro after Feb. 1. He was a member
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Recently retired,
he served as vice-president for academic affairs at Shaw University
in Raleigh.
Woodhouse was a freshman at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh when
she was arrested during a sit-down protest at Raleigh's Cameron
Village shopping center on Feb. 12, 1960. Forty-three students were
charged with trespassing while standing on privately owned sidewalks
in front of the F.W. Woolworth store at the shopping center.
Woodhouse currently resides in Virginia.
Cerese is an award-winning filmmaker who has worked for Video Dialog
Inc., a Durham-based production company, for 11 years. "February One"
aired nationally on PBS in February 2005 to mark the 45th anniversary
of the sit-in. The film was recently shown at the National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution, as part of a program
marking the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins. "February One" won Best
Documentary at the Carolina Film and Video Festival and received the
Human Rights Award at the RiverRun International Film Festival.
For more details, call 919-807-7900 or access ncmuseumofhistory.org
or Facebook®. The museum is located at 5 E. Edenton St., across from
the State Capitol.
--
The N.C. Museum of History's hours are Monday through Saturday, 9
a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. The
museum is part of the Division of State History Museums, Office of
Archives and History, an agency of the N.C. Department of Cultural
Resources. The department's Web site is www.ncculture.com.
--------
Lunch counter sit-ins: 50 years later
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/02/lunch-counter-sitins-50-years-later
By Denise Watson Batts
February 15, 2010
The four North Carolina A&T College students didn't know they had
started a movement on Feb. 1, 1960, when they sat at a lunch counter
in Greensboro, ordered coffee, were told no and refused to move.
But within days, Sandra Fenner and other students at the Norfolk
Division of Virginia State College had begun plotting. They would
enter the downtown F.W. Woolworth dime store on Lincoln's birthday,
take seats there and wait to be served.
Across the Chesapeake Bay to the north, Lula Sears Rogers and other
freshmen at Hampton Institute talked of commandeering seats at a
department-store counter on Queen Street.
Across the Elizabeth River to the west, 17-year-old Ed Rodman
listened to his classmates chatter about testing the whites-only
policy at MidCity Shopping Center. He thought his friends at I.C.
Norcom High School in Portsmouth were crazy, but he knew their frustration.
A year earlier, Norfolk schools had finally admitted the first blacks
into its previously all-white public schools. In Portsmouth, students
still were waiting.
It wasn't illegal for blacks and whites to sit and eat together, but
custom - and prejudice - dictated that it couldn't happen at public
lunch counters.
Six years after the landmark Supreme Court decision declaring
segregated schools unconstitutional, youths in Hampton Roads and
throughout the South were disappointed with the sluggish pace of
integration. Separately, they had arrived at the same conclusion:
They had had enough.
Students at Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, were the first
in Virginia to execute a plan.
Around lunchtime on Feb. 11, 1960, 20 to 30 took stools at Woolworth
on Queen Street and sat - unserved - until the counter closed about
an hour later. The next day, they did the same thing at a drugstore.
Though scared, Rogers soon joined them. She had been a senior at
Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk when the city had closed,
rather than integrate, schools, and she remembered the harassments
hurled at black students by whites.
She and her classmates walked to downtown Hampton, the men wearing
ties and the women in neat skirts to give store managers one less
reason to throw them out. They visited Langley Sweet Shop, West End
Pharmacy and C&L Confectionery.
Sometimes, Rogers got a seat. If the stools were filled, she'd stand.
Always, the waitresses seemed rude. What hurt her more was the look
of the black workers behind the counters.
They peeked out at the college students and seemed to plead, "Please,
go away. You're making it hard for us."
Rogers felt compelled to continue. On weekends, she'd return home and
join the Norfolk protests, which had gotten under way a day after Hampton's.
At 5:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 12, a lone Norfolk college student strolled
into the Woolworth on Granby Street. Soon after, he was joined by 37
others from the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College, now
Norfolk State University.
White customers left, and the closed signs went up at
5:45. The students stayed for 25 more minutes.
The next day, they returned, but Woolworth had roped off its lunch
counter. The students pressed on at another nearby store, S.S.
Kresge. In the days ahead, they would add a third target: W.T. Grant.
Fenner, a history major, said she didn't really want to eat downtown
and probably wouldn't have had enough money if a waitress had ever
offered to serve her.
It was the principle.
In Portsmouth, I.C. Norcom students crossed the street to Rose's
5-10-25 Cents Store on the same day that the protests began in Norfolk.
Eighteen took seats. Waitresses ignored them, but they didn't budge.
They went to MidCity Shopping Center on Monday and faced a few hecklers.
Tuesday afternoon, they arrived at Rose's and found the counter
occupied by white teens.
Rodman filled with dread. Things often got heated when students from
Wilson, the nearby white school, and Norcom, the black school, crossed paths.
This time was no different. The crowd, on the verge of becoming a
mob, spilled into the parking lot. The white students pulled out
hammers and pipes. A black teen got slammed in the face with a chain,
and a girl was hit with a street sign.
A group of black teens grabbed a chain and beat a knot of white students.
The fights ended quickly, and Rodman found himself the spokesman for
the Norcom students.
"There were just 25 of us to begin with," he told reporters at the
time, "and then this other element joined us."
He said students didn't care about eating at the counter.
"We just want the right to come here," he said.
The next day, the three MidCity stores with lunch counters closed
early in the afternoon, but by 3:30, about 3,000 people milled
between the Norcom school grounds and the parking lot.
Police officers with dogs stood ready, and teachers and coaches
mingled to keep tempers low.
No fights broke out, but nearly 30 people - adults and teens, whites
and blacks - were arrested for disorderly conduct. The crowd
dispersed around 5 p.m., and two stores - Rose's and W.T. Grant -
announced that they would suspend their food service temporarily.
Peoples Drug Store said it would start closing its counter about the
time schools let out.
Rodman knew his group of student protesters needed guidance. Within a
day, they had it.
Gordon Carey, a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality,
or CORE, lent a hand.
CORE, based in New York, grew out of a Chicago sit-in in 1942, around
the time many of the current protesters had been born.
Carey met with the Portsmouth students and helped them develop a
strategy that included moving the sit-ins downtown. The students
would go into a store, ask to be served, wait to be refused, then go
outside and distribute fliers asking people to boycott.
During a lunch break from the training, the students walked to
Woolworth on High Street to test their new skills. As expected, the
counter closed quickly. The students were excited. That had been
another part of the plan.
If they could not eat, no one else would either.
Over the next two weeks, the protests spread. Elizabeth City, N.C.
Suffolk. Richmond. By the end of February, sit-ins swept through more
than 30 communities in seven states.
In March, Time magazine published an article, "The South: Youth Will
Be Served," and wrote, "The young Negro, particularly the young
college Negro, is now leading the battle for equal rights. And unless
he is tossed into jail and onto a road gang, he is going to lead the
battle for a long time to come."
Hampton students celebrated an expensive victory. The Langley Sweet
Shop, for a brief time, served them but charged them double: $1 for a
cup of coffee and $1.50 for barbecue.
A sit-in in Nashville, Tenn., became a near riot, and stores there
began talking about relenting. Nationally, CORE and, later, U.S.
attorney general William Rogers began negotiating with chain stores
about integrating their lunch counters.
In late July, local store managers of Kresge, Woolworth and Grant
contacted a handful of black ministers and invited them to eat at
their lunch counters.
Some college and high school students learned about the plan and
rushed to join their elders in a victory the students thought was theirs.
It was a quiet, uneventful meal.
After six months, the sit-ins ended unceremoniously. Several chains
integrated their lunch counters, but others did not - and would not
until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
By mid-1960, most protesters had returned to their studies and more
quiet lives. But their actions had galvanized the civil rights movement.
Rogers went on to become a speech pathologist. She retired from
Portsmouth Public Schools and lives in Chesapeake.
Fenner retired as an administrator from the Chesapeake Public Schools
and resides in Virginia Beach. Though she helped make it possible,
she didn't eat at a downtown lunch counter until around 1970.
During the height of the protests, Rodman went to Raleigh, N.C., and
met with other student leaders. Together, they formed the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. He later attended Hampton
Institute and continued to lead demonstrations.
Rodman remained active in SNCC and CORE and later attended the
Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass.
An Episcopal priest, he now teaches there. The church, he said, lent
clout and legitimacy to his social justice platform, though he thinks
his mother went to her grave questioning why he joined the priesthood.
"She probably thought, 'He's got an angle,' " Rodman said. "And I did."
He noted that he has held only three jobs in his life, and all
involved social activism.
"You can't ask for anything better than that."
Denise Watson Batts, (757) 446-2504, denise.batts@pilotonline.com
.
