What protest tactic did black students in Greensboro, North Carolina initiate

Instead of walking away, the four college freshmen stayed in their seats until the lunch counter closed--giving birth to the "sit-in." The next morning, the four college students re-appeared at Woolworth's, accompanied by 25 fellow students. By the end of the week, protesters filled Woolworth's and other lunch counters in town. Now was their time, and they refused to end their nonviolent protest against inequality. Six months later, white city officials granted blacks the right to be served in a restaurant.

Although the four student protesters ascribed to Dr. King's doctrine of nonviolence, their opponents did not--assaulting the black students both verbally and physically. When the police finally arrived, they arrested black protesters, not the whites who tormented them.

By the end of February, lunch counter sit-ins had spread through 30 cities in seven Southern states. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a storekeeper unscrewed the seats from his lunch counter. Other stores roped-off seats so that every customer had to stand. Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia, hastily passed anti-trespassing laws to stem the outbreak of sit-ins. Despite these efforts, the nonviolent student protests spread across the South. Students attacked segregated libraries, lunch counters, and other "public" facilities.

In April, some 142 student sit-in leaders from 11 states met in Raleigh, North Carolina, and voted to set up a new group to coordinate the sit-ins, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told the students that their willingness to go to jail would "be the thing to awaken the dozing conscience of many of our white brothers."

In the summer of 1960, sit-ins gave way to "wade-ins" at segregated public beaches. In Atlanta, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Nashville, black students lined up at white-only box offices of segregated movie theaters. Other students staged pray-ins (at all-white churches), study-ins (at segregated libraries), and apply-ins (at all-white businesses). By the end of 1960, 70,000 people had taken part in sit-ins in over 100 cities in 20 states. Police arrested and jailed more than 3,600 protesters, and authorities expelled 187 students from college because of their activities. Nevertheless, the new tactic worked. On March 21, 1960, lunch counters in San Antonio, Texas, were integrated. By August 1, lunch counters in 15 states had been integrated. By the end of the year, protesters had succeeded in integrating eating establishments in 108 cities.

The Greensboro sit-in initiated a new, activist phase in black America's struggle for equal rights. Fed up with the slow, legalistic approach that characterized the Civil Rights Movement in the past, Southern black college students began to attack Jim Crow directly. In the upper South, federal court orders and student sit-ins successfully desegregated lunch counters, theaters, hotels, public parks, churches, libraries, and beaches. But in three states--Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina--segregation in restaurants, hotels, and bus, train, and airplane terminals remained intact. Young civil rights activists launched new assaults against segregation in those states.

Students rejected a proposal from city leaders for a two-week moratorium on protests to explore whether local custom would allow for integrated seating, and the next day an estimated 600 people—integrationists, segregationists, and onlookers—crammed into the Woolworth eating area. The Ku Klux Klan arrived, joining forces with what one reporter described as “[g]angs of shoving, shouting [white] teenagers.” Police removed a number of whites who were verbally abusing the protesters and arrested three white men. Someone called in a bomb threat, and police emptied the store. “The Negro students set up a wild round of cheering as the announcement of closing was made and carried their leaders out on their shoulders,” reported the local newspaper. They moved on to the nearby Kress store, which promptly shut down. Then they marched back to campus, chanting “It’s all over” and “We whipped Woolworth.” That night the students held another mass meeting where they agreed to hold off on further sit-ins to allow time for “negotiation and study.”

The Spark Catches

Events in Greensboro attracted not just local but also national press attention and inspired college students in other North Carolina cities to start their own sit-ins. On February 8, students in Durham and Winston-Salem sat in at their local lunch counters. In the following days, students in Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Elizabeth City, High Point, and Concord joined what quickly became a statewide movement.

This first wave of North Carolina sit-ins followed the Greensboro model. They often began with a bold, spontaneous act. The Winston-Salem sit-ins began when Carl Matthews, a graduate of the Winston-Salem Teachers College who worked in a local factory, sat down at the lunch counter of the Kress store in the middle of the lunch rush. Later that afternoon, six other African Americans, several of them students at the Teachers College, joined him—and the movement grew from there. In Raleigh, protests were sparked by a local radio announcer who confidently predicted that area college students would not follow Greensboro’s lead. Intent on proving him wrong, a group of students went downtown the following morning and began the Raleigh sit-ins.

As in Greensboro, segregationists hovered around the demonstrations, bringing intimidation, sporadic acts of violence, and threats of more serious retribution. When white youths threw eggs at black students seated at the Raleigh Woolworth’s lunch counter, the protesters “gave no reaction either to this or to jeers and catcalls thrown at them,” noted a reporter. Bomb threats became a common tactic for disrupting sit-ins.

There were also variations from the template established in Greensboro. In High Point, high school rather than college students initiated the sit-ins, and they received close guidance from adult civil rights leaders. The High Point protests also ran into some new obstacles. The day after sit-in protests led to a shutdown of two variety store lunch counters, a local merchant paid a group of white high school students to arrive early and occupy all the lunch counter stools at the Woolworth’s so the black protesters had nowhere to sit. When they came back the next day, the store had converted its lunch counter into a display counter, each stool adorned with a box of Valentine chocolates. The students converted their sit-in to a stand-in and forced the manager to shut down the store.

On February 11, students in Hampton, Virginia brought the sit-in movement beyond North Carolina. The next day, students in two more Virginia cities, Norfolk and Portsmouth, joined. Sit-ins continued to spread to new cities in North Carolina: Salisbury on February 16; Shelby on the 18th; Henderson on the 25th; and Chapel Hill on the 28th.

The first student arrests took place on February 12 when the manager of a Raleigh shopping center brought trespassing charges against forty-one students who had gathered outside a Woolworth whose lunch counter they had just forced to shut down. Fined $10 each, their convictions were quickly overturned on appeal. (The fact that they were arrested on the sidewalk and not inside the business itself meant they could claim the arrest violated their rights under the First Amendment.) On the same day, the movement spread deeper into the South, reaching Florida and South Carolina. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, white youths knocked a black protester from his stool, someone threw a bottle of ammonia into a store, setting off fumes that stung the eyes of the demonstrators inside, and then bomb threats cleared two targeted stores. The New York Times covered the Rock Hill protest on its front page—another first for the sit-in movement.

Nashville

News of the Greensboro protests spurred students in Nashville to follow through on their plans. On February 13, over one hundred students sat at lunch counters in three Nashville variety stores. The next sit-in, five days later, brought out 200 students; almost double that number came out two days later. The protests were carefully organized, orderly, and, as far as the sit-ins went, rather uneventful. The same could not be said about the next wave of protests, in late February. At the Nashville Woolworth store, one of five stores targeted, hundreds of people—reporters, supporters, opponents, and curious onlookers—crammed in to watch the sit-in demonstration, “like spectators at a boxing match,” according to one account. After more than an hour of escalating assaults against the students seated at the lunch counter, some white teenagers dragged three protesters from their stools and started beating them. “The three Negroes did not fight back, but stumbled and ran out of the store; the whites, their faces red with anger, screamed at them to stop and fight, to please goddam stop and fight. None of the other Negroes at the counter ever looked around. It was over in a minute.” Only then did the police step in, arresting eighty-one of the sit-in protesters (but none of the white assailants) on disorderly conduct charges.

Atlanta

Despite having many of the ingredients that would seem to predict robust sit-in movement activism, including a number of African American colleges and a group of committed activist students, the Atlanta movement was slow to get going. Atlanta students would not launch their own movement until the following fall, after the larger lunch counter sit-in movement had run its course.

After Greensboro, Atlanta student leaders sought the counsel of older black community leaders who urged them to direct their energies toward supporting ongoing negotiation and litigation efforts. Then, in early March, as students were preparing a series of downtown sit-in protests, university leaders persuaded them to postpone their protests once again, suggesting they first prepare a statement of principles. Published in Atlanta newspapers on March 9, “An Appeal for Human Rights” was a forceful denunciation of Jim Crow and a declaration of support for the sit-in movement. “We do not intend to wait placidly for those which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time,” proclaimed the student leaders. “Today's youth will not sit by submissively, while being denied all of the rights, privileges, and joys of life.”

After several more false starts, delays, and bickering among factions within the civil rights community, Atlanta’s students finally joined the sit-in movement. Lawyers had advised the students to focus their protests on publicly owned facilities and facilities that were involved in interstate transportation (and thus subject to federal nondiscrimination rules). At precisely 11:30 a.m. on March 15, after placing an anonymous phone call to the United Press International detailing their plans, Atlanta students launched a coordinated series of sit-in demonstrations at ten eating establishments. According to one news account, “[n]early everyone concerned, demonstrators, arresting police, onlookers, behaved quietly, unemotionally, as though in the performance of a ritual.” Police arrested seventy-seven demonstrators at cafeterias in the capitol, the county courthouse, city hall, and several bus terminals and train stations, charging them under a newly passed state antitrespassing law. Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver personally ordered the arrest of the students who targeted the state capitol cafeteria and then issued a statement that described “these mass violations of State law and private property rights” as “subversive in character.”

The day after the mass arrests, Donald Hollowell, a prominent African American lawyer who was representing the arrested students, persuaded the students to stop their protests until they received a “final judgment” in the pending court cases. The students turned their efforts to organizing a boycott of downtown department stores. An organized lunch counter sit-in campaign would not return to Atlanta until the following fall.

Violence in a Nonviolent Movement

White segregationist attacks on sit-in protesters escalated as the protests drew more participants, spread further south, and, in some instances, as student protesters decided to fight back when abused. An increase in violent confrontations between protesters and counterprotesters was a cost of success for the sit-in movement.

More violence was all but inevitable when the movement reached the Deep South. On February 25, thirty-five students sat in at the courthouse cafeteria in Montgomery, Alabama. The governor demanded that Alabama State College, an all-black institution, expel students who took part in the protests. In an expression of solidarity with those threatened with expulsion, 1,200 students from the college marched to the state capital. Montgomery police did nothing when Ku Klux Klan members arrived, armed with baseball bats, and attacked the marchers.

By mid-March, one reporter noted “increasing racial hostility—a belligerence on both sides that goes beyond the immediate issue of whether Negroes should be served, while they’re sitting down, at segregated lunch counters.” In Savannah, a white youth was arrested after punching a black sit-in demonstrator and breaking his jaw. The police hooked up fire hoses, ready to break up the crowds of whites and blacks. In late March, following a KKK meeting in Anniston, Alabama, members went around town setting up burning crosses and someone threw a fire bomb in the yard of the home of a lawyer representing sit-in protesters. The segregationist backlash took a sadistic turn in Houston. Two days after sit-ins began there, a group of segregationist vigilantes captured and tortured a young African American man, carving the letters “KKK” across his chest.

Although participants in the first wave of sit-in protests professed a commitment to nonviolence, this commitment weakened as the movement grew. Most sit-in demonstrators recognized nonviolent resistance to oppression as a strategically effective approach, but they did not necessarily embrace it as a way of life. As the sit-in movement swept more and more people into its orbit, a growing number of participants came to the demonstrations without a strong commitment to nonviolence, either as an ideology or a strategy. The violence that accompanied the sit-ins was overwhelmingly white brutality against African Americans and their white allies. But in some instances African Americans did not turn the other cheek.

After two weeks of rising tension and scattered white attacks on demonstrators, the first incident of black youths fighting back took place in High Point, North Carolina on February 15. School had been canceled because of a snowstorm, and a group of white youths took advantage of the day off to head down to the Woolworth’s that had been the target of several days of sit-in protests. They taunted and threw snowballs at the protesters, most of whom were high school students. When police stood by doing nothing, local NAACP leader Elton Cox declared, “We will not undergo embarrassment and assault again without fighting back.” After whites started punching black protesters leaving the local Woolworth store, some blacks returned their punches. The police stepped in, arresting two African Americans and one white. White abuse of the peaceful protesters was news; responding in kind was bigger news. “Negroes Fight Back in the South” was the headline the next day in the Amsterdam News, a New York-based black newspaper. The Atlanta Constitution ran the story under the headline, “Race Brawl Erupts at Restaurant.”

The next days brought more violence, this time in Portsmouth, Virginia where, as in High Point, high school students led the local sit-in effort. After whites attempted to block a protest by arriving at a targeted lunch counter ahead of the demonstrators and occupying all the stools, several hundred black and white youths collected in the parking lot outside the store, some armed with hammers, wrenches, chains, and razors. A fight erupted. A black student leader attributed the violence to “this other element” of local blacks who were not part of the planned demonstration. A CORE field officer soon arrived in Portsmouth to conduct workshops in nonviolence for the students.

In late February, sit-ins in Chattanooga, Tennessee led to two days of rioting. When police ordered a Kress lunch counter cleared after the store shut it down in the face of a sit-in demonstration, a brawl erupted involving about fifty black protesters and 150 white segregationists. Seven whites were arrested; there were no reported black arrests. The next day over one thousand whites were gathered in the downtown business district when demonstrators arrived. Police created a barrier to keep the two groups apart. Some threw bottles and rocks. Eleven blacks and nine whites were arrested. To break up those who refused to disperse, police turned fire hoses on both blacks and whites. When whites turned out in force the following day, the students decided to hold off on further protests.

These events illustrate how as the sit-in movement expanded its ranks, it attracted more people who had little or no connection with the coordination efforts and nonviolence training used in Greensboro, Nashville, and other places where the movement was most organized. The discipline and commitment to nonviolence that defined the first wave of protests remained evident in many locations, but not everywhere.

Policing Jim Crow

Along with the increase in extralegal violence, white segregationists responded to the sit-ins with legal action. The legal options available to defenders of lunch counter segregation were somewhat different from other battles of the civil rights movement. When civil rights protests took place on public property, as most did, since protesters usually targeted southern local and state governments, government officials were the ones who decided whether to arrest the protesters or not. But lunch counter sit-ins typically took place on private property, so the initial choice of whether to call the police was in the hands of the operators of these businesses. Their typical reaction was not to call the police. Most of these men (they were almost always men) saw themselves as businessmen first and foremost, and sending potential paying customers to jail for doing nothing more than asking to spend money at their lunch counters was not good business. They wanted the protests to stop, and their most common approach to dealing with them was to just ignore the protesters or, if that did not work, to shut down their lunch counters.

At a trial of seventy-five Nashville protesters, the judge promptly found protesters guilty of disorderly conduct and sentenced them to a fine of $50 or thirty days in jail. The students chose jail. The following day, four more Nashville students were found guilty of disorderly conduct and also chose to spend thirty-three days in jail rather than pay their fines. Three thousand supporters gathered outside the courthouse singing hymns and the National Anthem. Later that month, in Little Rock, a group of college students went straight from the city court, where they watched their classmates convicted on charges of breaching the peace for taking part in a sit-in protest, to a new round of downtown sit-ins. After they shut down several downtown lunch counters, they gathered at the state capital and sang “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Students thus demonstrated a new tactic that would become an integral part of the sit-in movement: transforming judicial proceedings into a new protest platform.

In Tallahassee, Florida, a local judge found eleven demonstrators guilty of disturbing the peace and chastised the students for their “complete disregard for private property rights” and for following “preachers, professors and organizations” who were using the students for “publicity purposes.” Three of the students chose to pay $300 fines; eight chose sixty-day jail sentences instead. The biggest single arrest of the sit-in movement took place in Orangeburg, South Carolina. When students heading toward a protest refused to turn back when ordered by police, they turned fire hoses on them. Since the jail could not contain the hundreds arrested, students were herded into a pen normally used as a chicken coop. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a group of sit-in protesters were arrested on charges of disturbing the peace. (“How were they disturbing the peace?” the students’ lawyer asked the arresting officer at the subsequent trial. “By sitting there,” he answered.) After finding them guilty, a judge doled out sentences of thirty days in jail plus a $100 fine. Administrators at Southern University also expelled eighteen students who took part in the sit-ins, leading to a mass student boycott of classes.

The NAACP reported that by June almost 2,000 students had been arrested for taking part in the demonstrations, with more than $44,000 paid in fines and $100,000 put up for bail.

Summer of 1960 and Beyond

When the spring term came to an end and many of the leaders and troops of the sit-in movement left campus, the lunch counter sit-in campaign, at least as a regionwide phenomenon, dissipated. Even before the end of the school year, there had been signs that the movement was slowing. The feverish excitement of those opening months was impossible to sustain. Much of the early energy of the protests was channeled into more organized forms, such as coordinated boycotts and negotiations. Protest leaders began to complain about lagging support among their classmates. With the end of the term, these challenges only increased.

With most college students scattered to hometowns and summer jobs, the work of the sit-ins was left to others. High school students took over the protests in some cities. In Knoxville, where students had difficulty mobilizing an effective sit-in campaign, a group of black and white professionals (some of whom had criticized the student movement) formed a group they called the Associated Council for Full Citizenship and launched their own sit-ins. Their carefully orchestrated campaign was far more effective than the halting student protests that had preceded it, and in just over a month they convinced Knoxville’s merchants to provide nondiscriminatory service.

What was the purpose of the sit ins quizlet?

What was one of the major student organizations engaged in organized protests and demonstrations against the Vietnam War?

Which group was a result of the sit in movement quizlet?

Which of the following was true of the Bay of Pigs invasion?