Three students from all-black TougalooCollege risked sitting down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 28, 1961. Memphis Norman is not in the picture because while police watched he was knocked to the floor by a former police officer named Benny Oliver and kicked in the head. The unconscious Norman was then dragged off to jail, accused of disorderly conduct. The two black women – Pearline Lewis and Ann Moody – were joined at the counter by two white activists, in the foreground – John Salter and Joan Trumpauer. The older man at left is the vicious racist and local bootlegger G.W. “Red” Hydrick, who two months earlier had pistol-whipped both Medgar Evers and a black photographer in front of the police.

SIT-INS SHAKE THE SOUTH

Customers in the downtown Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, could not believe what they were seeing at 4:30 pm on Monday, February 1, 1960. Four young black men were taking seats at a lunch counter where blacks had never sat before. A black worker behind the counter was aghast. “Fellows like you,” she said, “make our race look bad.” The young men were only 18, freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and TechnicalCollege named Ezell Blain, Jr., Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Joseph McNeil. They had been moved by the youngsters of Little Rock, and they had talked over what they themselves might do with a local white clothing merchant, Ralph Johns, a flamboyant son of Syrian immigrants with a passion for integration. They had no program, or the backing of any organization, and sit-ins during the fifties in 16 Southern and border cities and fizzled, but the Greensboro four created a shock wave that, as Taylor Branch put it, “helped define the new decade.” The hydra-headed civil rights movement was taking another sudden, daring and completely unanticipated jump into the unknown. With the movement’s early legal momentum stalled, its official boycott tactic at a standstill, there now erupted almost spontaneous street challenges to the iceberg of white supremacy.

Ezell Blair, Jr., did not get the cup of coffee he asked for. “We don’t serve Negroes,” the white waitress told them, and they were still sitting unserved when the store closed. The next morning 23 male and female students showed up at the lunch counter. They brought their textbooks for the long, strange wait, and they sat in shifts to avoid missing classes. Before the week had passed more than 400 students were taking part. The sit-in protests spread to shopping centers, drug-stores and drive-ins, then around the state to Raleigh, Durham, Winston-Salem, High Point. By the end of the month thousands of mainly black students in seven states and 31 communities were engaged; there were read-ins at public libraries, stand-ins and theaters, paint-ins at public art galleries, wade-ins at segregated public beaches, kneel-ins at white churches.

The most significant reaction was in Nashville, Tennessee, like Greensboro a center of black education. The Nashville students had been training in workshops on nonviolent protest set up by an affiliate of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and run by a black theology student at Vanderbilt, James Lawson, and the white Rev. Glenn E. Smiley. Lawson, a 30-year-old disciple of King, was the son of a Northern Methodist minister. He had gone to prison during the Korean war as a conscientious objector, and then taken himself to India to study the methods of Mahatma Gandhi. Lawson thought the Nashville students needed more training, but a mass meeting on Friday, February 5, brimmed over with eagerness to move. On Saturday, 500 polite, well-dressed students began the Nashville sit-ins. In Woolworth’s on February 27 a group of white hoodlums yelling “Nigger” and “chicken” pressed lighted cigarettes on the backs and in the hair of sitters, singling out women. The police arrested the victims. Vanderbilt expelled Lawson – and then back down when 400 teachers threatened to resign.

The climax came in mid-April. Racists blew up the home of Alexander Looby, a black city councilman and attorney. Four thousand outraged residents, black and white, marched spontaneously to City Hall. Mayor Ben West, who had been trying to find a compromise, came out to meet them. “We are all Christians together. Let us pray together,” said West. A student called out: “How about eating together?” Then another student, Diane Nash, a Midwesterner who as 22 years old, was inspired to ask a simple question: Did he as a human being feel it was wrong to discriminate against anyone solely on the basis of race or color? “Well, in my heart,” said Mayor West, “I have to say that I think it is wrong… I appeal to all citizens to end discrimination, to have no bigotry, no bias, no hatred.” It was at the time an amazing statement for a white public official to make.

Mayor West years later said it was a question he had to answer “as a man and not a politician.” The marchers broke into cheers. Lunch counters were desegregated three weeks later. Theaters, hotels and restaurants followed.

Many of the older civil rights campaigners feared that the sit-in movement was too provocative. But Martin Luther King, the most prominent embodiment of black protest in America, backed the students. It was at a conference called by his SCLC in August that the various student groups came together to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC provided the shock troops for the movement over the next five years, and they were inspired by a speech from the SCLC’s “very regal” executive director, Ella Baker, a woman who had devoted her whole life to civil rights even then the cause seemed hopeless. The movement, she said, had to produce “more than a hamburger.”

STANDING IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR: Alabama Governor George Wallace vowed at his inauguration, “Segregation now – segregation tomorrow – segregation forever!” He played the same charade as his counterpart Barnett in Mississippi, but more skillfully. In June 1963 he stood in the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama to deny admission to Vivian Malone and James Hood, the first black students. But he and ringed the university with police and warned off the thugs. He reasoned, rightly, that peaceful defiance was wiser and more likely to build a permanent sense of white grievance that he could exploit. After the moment of glory, he yielded to the federalized National Guard and stepped aside. Malone and Hood walked through the door to a round of applause. That night both were welcomed by white student leaders.

JAMES MEREDITH’S VIOLENT ENTRY INTO “OLE MISS”

NO GO: Chief U.S. Marshall James McShane tried to push his way past Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson; who, backed by state troopers, barred the admission of James Meredith to Ole Miss. John Doar, the Justice Department agent, has a calming hand on Meredith’s shoulder.
James Meredith was a short, wiry and emotionally tough man of 29 who had served in the Air Force and studied at Mississippi’s all-black JacksonState. Four times in a week in September 1962, Governor Ross Barnett defied the Supreme Court by interposing himself between Meredith and registration at the University of / Mississippi (Ole Miss). Barnett was a tool of the burgeoning White Citizens Councils and lethally stupid. He stirred up mobs from all over the Deep South. Never would he give in, he said, while knowing he would, and secretly trying to write a script that would make him appear a gallant victim in a phony confrontation. He asked Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to have 24 federal marshals threaten him: “They must all draw their guns. Then they could point their guns at us and then we could step aside.” On Sunday, September 30, facing indefinite jail for contempt of court unless Meredith was admitted by Tuesday, October 2, Barnett promised police protection for him, then reneged. At dusk on that Tuesday, Meredith and 300 marshals were exposed to a mob of more than 2,000 (at its peak). All night the rioters hurled rocks, lead pipe and Molotov cocktails and tried to get at Meredith and the marshals. Later there was / gunfire directed at the marshals, who never fired back. A reporter and a bystander were shot dead. The marshals threw tear gas. An amazing 166 of them were wounded, 28 by bullets. Kennedy was slow to order troops. They did not arrive until 4 am.
Meredith was registered the next day. Kennedy pumped a total of 23,000 troops into Oxford, three times the town’s population. Meredith graduated on August 18, 1963, and went on to pick up a law degree from Columbia. In June 1966, He set out to walk from Memphis to Jackson to encourage black voter registration Ten miles out, a white man emerged with a shotgun and left Meredith screaming on the road with over a hundred pellets in him. He recovered, but he eventually grew so disillusioned he joined the staff of one of the South’s most mean-spirited and unrecon-structed racists, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

READING COMPREHENSION:

SIT-INS SHAKE THE SOUTH

  1. The primary purpose of the passage is to:
  2. show that the blacks students were troublemakers
  3. illustrate the impact of the black students on the Civil Rights Movement
  4. describe how Mayor Ben West was a racist
  5. identify Martin Luther King’s impact on the Civil Rights Movement
  1. According to the article, which of the following statements about the sit-ins is true?
  2. black women were targeted for abuse
  3. no whites supported the movement
  4. most of the white protesters were members of the clergy
  5. the whites who abused the protesters were arrested
  1. According to the article, which of the following was a result of the bombing of Alexander Looby’s home?
  2. the end of the Movement
  3. a massive protest
  4. an FBI investigation
  5. Dr King’s assassination
  1. The author’s attitude toward the protesters was one of:
  2. disdain
  3. admiration
  4. pity
  5. fear
  1. Mayor Ben West’s statement to Diane Nash was described as “amazing” by the author because…
  1. Another title for this article would be?