January 29, 2020 • 37 mins
On Feb. 1, 1960, four students sat down at a segregated lunch counter at the F.W. Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. It started with just four of them, but others joined, and sit-ins were taking place around the U.S.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the Greensboro lunch
Counter sit ins, and that was a critical moment in
(00:22):
the civil rights movement in the United States. On February
one of nineteen sixty four freshmen from Agricultural and Technical
College of North Carolina, which is now in North Carolina
A and T State University sat down at a segregated
lunch counter at the F. W. Woolworth's Five and Dime
in Greensboro, North Carolina. And on that first day, it
(00:43):
was just the four of them, but soon hundreds of
people were joining the demonstrations in downtown Greensboro, and sit
ins were also taking place in dozens of other cities
around the United States. This is frequently described as the
beginning of a movement, but really the Greensboro for cat
alized something that had been building in the years leading
up to that first day of sitting in. So that
(01:05):
is the story we're going to tell today for a
brief recap on where the Civil rights movement was in
nineteen sixty after the end of the reconstruction period that
followed the U. S. Civil War, many parts of the
United States established systems of racial segregation. This is often
discussed in the context of separating the black population from
the white population, but in parts of the country that
(01:26):
we're home to other racial and ethnic minorities, segregation targeted
those populations as well. The U. S. Supreme Court found
that this was legal as long as the separate facilities
were equal in its decision in plus e versus Ferguson
in eight six. We did an episode on plus e
versus Ferguson on February. Yeah, if you have been listening
(01:47):
to our show for a long time, none of this
is news to you, or if you've studied the civil
rights movement in other contexts, but we know not everyone has.
So people had been fighting for equal rights for racial
and ethnic minority use before Lessie versus Ferguson, and they
continued to do so afterward. But it wasn't until the
nineteen forties and fifties that some major changes really started
(02:08):
to happen in that regard. President Harry Truman issued Executive
Order one which desegregated the US Arms Services in nineteen.
That's come up in a lot of our previous episodes
that touch on the US military during World War Two.
In nineteen fifty four, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled
that public school segregation was unconstitutional in Brown versus Board
(02:30):
of Education of Topeka. Then the Montgomery bus boycott lasted
from December fifth nine to December twenty, nineteen fifty six.
The boycott led to another Supreme Court decision in which
the court upheld the ruling that Alabama state law requiring
segregated busses was also unconstitutional. We have two part episodes
(02:50):
on Brown versus Board and on the Montgomery bus boycott
in our archive as well. On September nine of nineteen
fifty seven, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed to the Will
Rights Act of nineteen fifty seven into law. The final
version of this law was a lot weaker than the
bill that was originally proposed, and South Carolina Senator Strom
(03:10):
Thurman filibustered for more than twenty four hours to try
to prevent it from being passed at all. Even so,
this was the first federal civil rights legislation passed since
the Reconstruction era, and it established a Commission on Civil
Rights as well as some basic voter rights protections. There was,
of course, a lot more to the civil rights movement
(03:31):
than just that, but these were some of the key
moments that we're just using to set the stage. And
after nineteen fifty seven, many civil rights leaders in the
US felt like the movement had started to stall. The
n double a c P, which had been established in
nineteen o nine, was still working primarily through legal strategies.
The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE, had been established
(03:52):
in nineteen forty two and was still focused on non
violent activism, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC
grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott and was formally
established in nineteen fifty seven. It helped coordinate and organize
among more local civil rights organizations across the US, also
with non violent activism. But while these and other organizations,
(04:15):
along with individual people, were still hard at work, it
just seemed like the movement wasn't seeing the visible activity
and forward steps that it had in previous years. The
Supreme Court's decision in Brown versus Board had also led
to a massive backlash in which many communities took extreme
steps to try to avoid integrating their schools. We talked
(04:36):
about that in those earlier episodes as well. Civil rights
advocates had faced intimidation, harassment, and violence throughout this movement,
and that was part of that backlash to brown versus
board as well. And this brings us to Greensboro, North Carolina,
a city first established in eighteen o eight. North Carolina
in general considered itself to be more racially progressive than
(04:57):
many of its neighbors, and this was a specially true
in Greensboro. Overall, the white majority thought that race relations
in the city were pretty good, especially compared to places
in the Deep South, it had become notorious for racism
and racist violence. Greensborough's kind of relative progressiveness and its
attitude on this was thanks in part to a large
(05:18):
Quaker community. As we've talked about on the show before,
the Religious Society of Friends became an active part of
the movement for the abolition of slavery, and it was
also part of the civil rights movement after that point.
That attitude was also connected to a large population of
students and academics thanks to the number of colleges and
universities in the city, the Society of Friends had established
(05:40):
New Garden Boarding School, which was the state's first co
educational boarding school, in eighteen thirty seven. The boarding school
was turned into a liberal arts college a few years
later and as Guilford College today. As Greensboro grew, its
educational institutions also came to include colleges and universities for
black students. This include had Bennett College, which was a
(06:01):
private college established for black women in eighteen seventy three.
What's now North Carolina Anti State University was established in
Raleigh as a and m college for the colored race
in eight one. It moved to Greensboro in eighteen nine three.
By the start of the twentieth century, Greensboro was home
to five colleges and universities, three for white students and
(06:23):
two for black students. Charlotte Hawkins Brown also established the
Palmer Memorial Institute, which was a prep school for black students,
and that was outside the city proper, established in nineteen
o two. So all of this was contributing to that
overall sense that Greensboro was sort of a a nice
place to be in forward thinking and things were pretty
good there, uh, and that idea that Greensboro was pretty
(06:47):
forward thinking on race continued into the civil rights movement.
On May eighteenth of nineteen fifty four, the day after
the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown
versus Board of Education, the Greensboro School Board publicly announced
its intention to comply with the ruling. This made it
the first city in the Southeast to make that kind
of public announcement, but actually following through with that announcement
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was another story. It took three years before any black
students were enrolled at a previously all white school in Greensboro,
and for many years after that, school integration was really
a token effort. It took well over a decade before
Greensboro schools were really integrated, and as has been the
case in so many parts of the US, patterns of
(07:30):
segregation have gradually returned since then. So by nineteen sixty,
even though Greensboro's white leadership thought of itself as a
fair and just city where race relations were overall positive,
school desegregation was barely getting started, and a lot of
other public facilities were still segregated as well. The golf
courses had been integrated thanks to a demonstration that started
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on December seven, nineteen fifty five, when six black men
were arrested while playing a round of golf at Greensboro's
Why it's only Gillespie Golf Course, But the swimming pools
were still segregated in spite of demonstrations led by Edward Edmonds,
who taught sociology at Bennett College. Also still segregated were
restaurants and the more casual lunch counters found in variety
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stores and drug stores. That's what students in Greensboro we're
trying to change in nineteen sixty. More about that after
a sponsor break. Sitens like the ones that were carried
out in Greensboro in nineteen sixty are a form of
direct action. This is a term that was coined in
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the early twentieth century to describe actions like Boycott's or strikes,
which are meant to help the demonstrators reached their goals
directly in the most efficient and effective way possible. Although
direct action isn't always nonviolent, the direct action employed during
a lot of the Civil rights movement generally was sit ins.
As a form of non violent direct action date back
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earlier than the Civil rights its movement, though one of
its precursors is the sit down strike. We have talked
about a number of strikes that were part of the
labor movement in the US and Europe in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and for many of these, striking workers picketed, demonstrated,
held rallies, and tried to block replacement workers from getting
into their workplace from outside. A sit down strike was different.
(09:22):
Striking workers took over their workplaces and sat down inside,
sometimes right at their workstations. One of the first large
scale sit down strikes was the Flint sit down strike,
which started on December nine, thirty six, but it followed
other smaller strikes at other factories. General Motors workers in Flint,
Michigan went on strike for recognition of the United Auto
(09:44):
Workers as their collective bargaining agent and for better pay,
grievance procedures, other workplace rights and protections, the same types
of things that we've generally talked about in these previous episodes.
Striking workers stopped working, locked themselves in the bill holding
and sat down at their stations, and this effectively shut
down the plant. The striking workers weren't working and replacement
(10:07):
workers couldn't get into work either. Within a few years,
civil rights activists had adopted a similar strategy in the
fight for racial equality. A restaurant could not make any
money if all of its seats were being occupied by
black customers who the restaurant was refusing to serve, or
supporters of other races who were taking up space but
refusing to place their orders unless the restaurants served those
(10:29):
black customers who were waiting. Of course, picketing, rallies and
other demonstrations, as well as legal actions and other tactics
could be part of this kind of demonstration as well.
There was at least one sit in style demonstration that
happened earlier than this to protest segregation in another context,
but when it comes to food service specifically, the first
(10:50):
documented sit ins protesting segregation happened in nine with multiple
protests taking place that year. Polly Murray, who was a
law student how University, organized a stool sitting by Howard
students to protest segregation at the Little Palace cafeteria in Washington,
d C. Along with her other work and civil rights activism,
(11:11):
Murray went on to become the first African American woman
to become an episcopal priest. Students at Howard also sat
in at the United Cigar Store in Washington, d C.
In ninety three after Ruth Powell, Marian Musgrave, and Wanting
to Morrow experienced discrimination there. These three sophomores had ordered
hot chocolate, and at first they were refused service. The
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staff at United Cigar Store called the police. The police
say they didn't have any grounds to remove these three women,
so they were served their hot chocolate, but when the
bill came, they had been charged twenty five cents each
rather than the actual price of ten cents. When they
refused to pay that extra amount, they were arrested. Howard
Student Chapter of the n double a CP organized a
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protest of the United Cigar Company and of DC area
restaurants in the hope of ending their discriminatory practices and
of getting civil rights legislation passed. In this case, the
students at Howard ended their demonstrations after a lot of deliberation,
at the request of Dr Mordecai W. Johnson, who was
president of the university. This started out as more of
(12:17):
a temporary request for the students to suspend their protest
while the university figured out what its policies were regarding
this kind of off campus demonstration, but the students eventually
decided to stop the protest entirely because of the possibility
of the university losing its federal funding. Since Howard is
in Washington, d C. There were concerns that legislators might
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feel like the student's behavior was antagonizing them and cut
off the school's budget. By that point, though, the students
had gotten some of the restaurants in Washington, d C.
To stop their segregation policies, but they hadn't reached the
goal of trying to get civil rights legislation passed. Activists
in Chicago held sit ins in nineteen as well. Jack
(13:00):
Sprats Coffeehouse in Chicago had a reputation for treating black
customers with rudeness and hostility, or denying them service outright.
This included refusing service to James Farmer. In ninety two,
Farmer helped organize inter racial groups, each with at least
one black member, to take up seats at the diner.
They'd all refused to leave until their black member was served.
(13:23):
The Committee of Racial Equality, which became the Congress of
Racial Equality, grew out of this experience, with Farmer as
one of its founders. These are just examples from that
first documented year of sit ins to protest segregation, and
sit ins continued to be organized and multiple cities throughout
the nineteen forties and fifties. In the three years leading
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up to the Greensboro sit ins of nineteen sixty there
were organized sit ins and at least fifteen cities. Many
of them were organized by Core, either alone or working
in conjunction with the Double A c P, although other
community and church groups organized sit ins during those three
years as well. This included sit ins in North Carolina.
On June nineteen fifty seven, the Reverend Douglas Moore and
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six others were arrested at the Royal Ice Cream Parlor
in Durham, North Carolina for sitting in the whites only section.
Just as sit ins were not a brand new phenomenon
in nineteen sixty, A and T also had a long
history of student political involvement and demonstrations by that point,
something that is of course true of a lot of
other college campuses. Students had demonstrated, gone on strike, they
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had taken other actions in response to everything from administrative
policies that they wanted to change to the quality of
the food in the cafeteria. In nineteen A and T
students disrupted a speech by then North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges,
who was in favor of voluntary segregation and whose language
in that speech was belittling and racist. These demonstrations weren't
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limited to things related to campus life. In ninety seven,
students from A and T boycotted Green Burrows movie theaters
over the practice of deleting scenes with black characters from films.
The theaters also required black patrons to enter through a
separate door and to sit in a separate section. Based
on the history of political activism at the school, it's
(15:15):
being about an hour away from Durham, and the overall
interconnectedness of civil rights activists in the nineteen fifties, it's
likely that students at A and T had heard about
the demonstrations in Durham and elsewhere. The Greensboro sit ins
started with four freshmen who became known as the Greensboro Four.
These were Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Eazel
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Blair Jr. Who later became known as Jabrel Kazan. Some
of them had known one another when they were in
high school at Dudley High School in Greensboro before they
started college. In college, the four of them had become
very close friends. They were all politically active and aware,
and they tended to have conversations in the dorm late
into the night about topics like civil rights and racial justice.
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But the ration they cited for their sit in was
the treatment Joseph McNeil received while traveling back to campus
by bus after the winter break in nineteen sixty. McNeil
had been born in North Carolina, but had moved to
New York with his family before returning to Greensboro to
attend A and T. He traveled between New York and
Greensboro by bus. On these trips, he saw firsthand how
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his treatment changed based on how far south he had traveled.
On this strip back to the school in nineteen sixty,
he was denied service at a restaurant at a Greyhound
bus station, and from there he decided to change things.
He convinced his three classmates that they should sit in
at the F. W. Woolworth counter in downtown Greensboro. They
set a date for doing this of February one. Although
(16:43):
black customers were allowed to shop at the Woolworth Store.
They could only buy food there at a stand up
snack bar, not at the lunch counter, which had actual seating.
In later years, all four men talked about being terrified
of what could happen to them if they did this.
All of them vividly remembered the nine lynching of Emmett Till,
(17:03):
who had been brutally beaten and murdered after a white
woman said that he had whistled at and physically accosted her.
She later admitted that this was false, and we talked
more about that in detail in our seen episode titled
The Motherhood of Mamie Till Mobley. Apart from the inherent
horror of this murder, the Greensboro four were about the
same age as Emmett had been when he was killed,
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so they were absolutely aware that they were putting themselves
at risk in doing this, as was the case with
the people who took on all of those earlier sit ins.
On the afternoon of Monday, February one, they met up
at Blueford Library on the Anti campus, wearing their Sunday best.
McCain was in his r OTC uniform because he hadn't
had time to change. They did not expect that they
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would be coming back to campus that day. As McCain
described it later on, quote, if I were lucky, I
would go to jail for a long long time. If
I were not quite so lucky, I would come back
to my campus, but in a pine box. This was
also really personal for the four of them. Also, in
McCain's words from later in his life, quote manhood and dignity.
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That's what we were trying to get. We didn't go
down to Woolworth to change the world. It was about
a fifteen minute walk from the campus to Woolworth, and
once they got there, they each bought a few small
necessities in the store, and they kept their receipts so
that they could prove that they were customers. Then they
took seats at the lunch counter. The staff refused to
serve them and told them to leave, but they stayed put,
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showing their receipts and asking why they could spend their
money in the store but not at the lunch counter.
In their accounts, a black food service worker also told
them to leave, saying that they shouldn't cause trouble. In
later years, the men also told slightly different versions of
their encounter with an older white woman that first day
that she either said that she was proud of them
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for what they were doing and asked why it had
taken so long, or some versions suggest that she was
disappointed in them because it had taken so long. Finally,
the store manager, Clarence Harris, known as Curly, decided the
best course of action was to close the store early.
When the four young men left, they said they would
be back the next day. When they got back to campus,
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they formed a student Executive Committee for Justice to try
to keep themselves and their classmates focused and to make
sure anyone who joined the sit in understood their standards
for dress, behavior and non violence. They were to be
neatly and nicely dressed, with men in coats and ties
and women in dresses, stockings, and heels. They were to
be gracious and polite, including not talking back if they
(19:34):
were insulted or sworn at. We will have more on
this after another quick sponsor break. When they planned their
sit in at the Woolworth lunch counter, the Greensboro four
had the support of Ralph John's, who was a white
business owner who opposed segregation. John's contacted the local press
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while they were sitting in. Photographer Jack Mobes of the
Greensboro Record took a photo of the four young men
on their way out of the store. The newspapers started
covering the sit in right away. More reporters were on
hand on February two, and the student demonstrators had grown
from their those first four people to a total of
about twenty. On Wednesday, the third, more than sixty students
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were sitting at the lunch counter. Crowd started forming before
the store opened, with black students and white counter protesters,
each trying to fill all of the seats at the
lunch counter. White opponents to the sit in included members
of the Ku Klux Klan. There is a documentary on
this called February one, and they tell stories about this
(20:42):
kind of rush to try to get all the seats. Uh.
And in some cases, like the white people who sat
down were trying to keep the demonstrators from sitting down.
But then in other cases it was more like people
would sit down and us the you know, the staff
would come over to take their order and they would say,
think he was here before me actually, and sort of
(21:03):
claimed the space in that way. So there was a
lot going on, uh. In terms of this rush for
seats at the lunch counter. Women were also involved in
this protest from its earliest days. Like A and T.
Bennett College had a long and established history of civil
rights activism among its student body, including being part of
the earlier Greensboro demonstrations that we talked about before the break.
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Women from Bennett who were nicknamed Bennett Bells are referenced
in news reports from the fourth day of the demonstration,
but they were probably there earlier. Bennett students were also
a big part of the sit ins ongoing planning, and
hundreds of them sat in at the lunch counters over
the course of the sit ins. News reports also mentioned
white women from Women's College which is now You and
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c G who joined. On the third day. On Thursday,
February fourth, more than three hundred people made their way
to downtown Greensboro, and the sit in spread from the
Woolworth lunch counter to the counter at the nearby S. H.
Crest store. The sit ins became national news, and people
started organizing sit ins at lunch counters in other cities.
(22:09):
Nationally televised news coverage was one of the reasons that
the Greensboro sit in sparked a more national movement when
those earlier sit ins that we talked about really hadn't.
But it was also because by nineteen sixty most major
cities were home to church leaders and civil rights activists
who were trained in non violence and direct action. So
when words started to spread of what was happening in Greensboro,
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people in other cities were already ready to go. People
started picketing and boycotting at northern Woolworth locations that weren't
segregating their lunch counters as well to try to get
the whole chain to change its policies. On Friday, February five,
the Greensboro sit in saw its first arrests, with three
white men arrested for intimidation after setting a black man's
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coat on fire at the counter. Then, on February six,
both Woolworth and Cress closed due to a bomb threat.
The student demonstrators agreed to a two week truce while
the stores tried to work out a desegregation plan. As
that was happening, siden started in Winston Salem, about thirty
miles from Greensboro on February eighth. February, students and civil
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rights leaders from Nashville Christian Leadership Conference started sitting in
at restaurants in Nashville, Tennessee. This was actually something they
had already been working on. Just a few days before
the Greensboro sit in started. Black students had visited lunch
counters in Nashville to confirm that they would not be
served there. As part of their planning of a series
of sit ins. More than a hundred and twenties students
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from American Baptist College, Fisk University, and Tennessee A and
I State University sat in at three Nashville stores, all
of which wound up closing early on that first day.
One of the student demonstrators in Nashville was John Lewis,
who was a student at American Baptist College at the time.
On February sixteenth, Martin Luther King Jr. Spoke at White
Rock Baptist Church and during North Carolina. Afterwards, some of
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the Greensborough demonstrators were able to meet him, and he
expressed his support for what they were doing. King also
credited the Greensboro sit ins with reinvigorating the movement. People,
mostly students, kept organizing sit ins and more and more cities,
most of them in the South. We are not at
all touching on all of them. These are just some examples.
On February, students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, sat in at
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the Crest lunch counter. On February seven, the number of
student demonstrators in Nashville, Tennessee, swelled to four hundred. They
were attacked by white counter protesters that day. The demonstrating
students were beaten and burned with cigarettes, and eighty one
of them were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, even
(24:47):
though they were not the instigators and had not fought back.
The arrested students bail was set at a hundred dollars,
but they opted to remain in jail even after that
amount was lowered. That actually was a strategy and a
lot to this movement, that to choose jail rather than bail.
One of the organizers of the Nashville sit ins was
the Reverend James Lawson, who was pursuing graduate studies at
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the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt's divinity program was integrated.
Lawson had been incarcerated as a conscientious objector during the
Korean War and had studied Gandhi's principles of non violent
activism in India. The media in Nashville framed him as
an outside agitator who was advocating lawlessness. On March three,
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the Board of trust at Vanderbilt met to discuss the situation,
and they ultimately offered him the choice of withdrawing from
the Divinity School or being expelled, and he chose expulsion,
which led to widespread student demonstrations at Vanderbilt and the
resignations of nearly all the Divinity School faculty. On March fifteen,
about a thousand students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, held a
(25:54):
march to protest segregation in Orangeburg and to support the
sit ins that were happening in other parts of South Carolina.
On March seven, students from Southern University sat in at
the Crest Counter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. All of them
were arrested and their bail was set at fifteen hundred
dollars each. Civil rights leader Reverend T. J. Jemison headed
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the effort to raise funds for them. The next day,
there were sit ins at Steimond's drug store in Baton Rouge,
as well as the Greyhound station, and students from Southern
University walked out of class to march to the capitol.
Sixteen students were arrested and suspended from school. Many were convicted,
with the U. S. Supreme Court overturning those convictions. Later
on on April one, sit ins and other demonstrations resumed
(26:39):
in Greensboro. That two weeks suspension and demonstrations had dragged on,
it had become clear that these negotiations to actually integrate
the lunch counters were going nowhere. Demonstrators also started asking
people to boycott the downtown stores, and even people who
didn't support integration had started avoiding the whole area because
of the sit ins the other demonstrations. On that same day,
(27:02):
students from Burke High School sat in at the Crest
lunch Counter in Charleston, South Carolina. This demonstration lasted for
only a day, as all of the students who participated
were arrested in Double A CP Branch president Jay Arthur
Brown paid their bail of ten dollars each. Also in April,
Ella Baker, who was active in the Double A c
(27:23):
P and had helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
held a meeting for student activists at Shaw University and Raleigh.
The result of that meeting was the establishment of the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee or SNICK. SNICK has its
own history beyond this sit in movement. Parts of that
history are contentious, but it became a major organization in
(27:44):
the civil rights movement in the nineteen sixties, especially when
it came to young people's activism. On April nineteenth, in Nashville,
the home of the student demonstrator's defense lawyer was bombed,
causing extensive damage to it and the surrounding buildings, but
thankfully not causing any injury. These are deaths. In response,
students led a silent march of about three thousand people.
(28:06):
The day after the march, Martin Luther King Jr. Spoke
at Fisk University, and that address was also delayed because
of the bomb threats. On May tenth, nearly all the
stores that students had targeted in Nashville started integrating their
lunch counters. Back in Greensboro, Kress had closed its lunch
counter entirely for a while to try to avoid this
whole situation, and when it reopened, it roped off the
(28:28):
counter to try to allow staff to control who could
or couldn't get in when black students walked past the
rope and sat down anyway. Police arrested more than forty people,
including three of the Greensboro four. At this point, the
end of the academic year was approaching, and in some cities,
store owners and local authorities we're hoping that things would
(28:48):
kind of just blow over, or at least calm down
when students went home for the summer. In Greensboro, Curly
Harris had gotten a memo from Woolworth's regional headquarters to
integrate the lunch counter, but had left it up to
him as to when to do it, and so he
decided to do it on July, when school was no
longer in session. He chose four employees, Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison,
(29:11):
and Nathan Jones and Charles Best to be the first
black customers served at the lunch counter. He asked them
to bring a change of clothes with them to work
that day so they would be in street clothes when
they ate. He also advised them that if they did
not want their picture in the paper, they should eat
as quickly as they could. Those are the names that
I have found for the four employees, but there are
some sources that you'll find that say it was three
(29:32):
employees rather than four. When college students returned in the fall,
some did go to the store to test out whether
integration really was happening at the lunch counter, but it
did not become like the go to place for students
that been at or A and T to eat. By
the end of nineteen sixty, there had been sit ins
in at least one hundred cities and at least seventy
thousand people had participated. A year after that initial February
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first protest, at least one hundred forty cities had desegregated
their lunch counters, both in response to sit ins in
those cities and also out of fear that they could
be targeted next. This wasn't at all the end of
the sit in movement. The sit ins are often credited
with reviving the civil rights movement, as we've mentioned earlier,
and they're also credited with training a new generation of
(30:18):
civil rights activists who participated in them. Moving beyond nineteen sixty,
students and others started turning their focus to things like
segregated movie theaters, restaurants, and other facilities. Those demonstrations were
met with similar waves of counter demonstrations, arrests, and violence.
This included wade ends in Biloxi, Mississippi, which started in
(30:40):
nineteen fifty nine and then recurred several times through nineteen
sixty three, although it was another four years after that
before a federal appeals court ruled that the public beaches
had to desegregate. Back at the top of the show,
we mentioned school desegregation and bus desegregation. In those cases,
the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled their racial segregation
(31:01):
in public schools and state laws requiring bus segregation were unconstitutional,
but the Supreme Court did not make a similar ruling
about privately owned businesses that are also open to the public,
such as movie theaters, stores, and lunch counters. Between nineteen
sixty one and nineteen sixty four, waves of appeals made
their way to the U. S. Supreme Court as students
(31:22):
fought their convictions for trespassing, disturbing the peace, and similar
charges in conjunction with their involvements in the sit in movement.
For the most part, the Supreme Court found in favor
of the students in these cases and overturned their convictions,
but the Court generally did so on pretty narrow grounds.
The decisions cited things like procedural issues or, in some cases,
(31:44):
local or state non discrimination laws that had been passed
since the students were first convicted. The Supreme Court really
did not answer the broader constitutional question in these rulings. However,
in nineteen sixty four, President Didn't be Johnson signed the
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, which was legislation
that President John F. Kennedy had advocated before his assassination
(32:08):
in nineteen sixty three. This Act outlawed discrimination on the
basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It
also required equal access to public places and employment regardless
of race, among other protections. Of course, this did not
fix racism or discrimination, but it was the nation's first
(32:29):
broad civil rights law since the Reconstruction era, offering more
protections than the Civil Rights Act of nineteen fifty seven had.
Regarding the Greensboro four, after they graduated from ant all
of them found it difficult to get work in Greensboro
because of their involvement in the sit ins. All of them,
except for David Richmond, ultimately left the city. Richmond sent
(32:51):
spent a few years living in western North Carolina before
going back to Greensboro to take care of his aging parents.
Even then, when years had passed, he struggled to find work,
and he faced ongoing issues with his physical and mental health,
as well as alcohol abuse, which the people around him
attributed to the way he had been traded for his
civil rights work. He died on December seventh of nineteen
(33:12):
ninety at the age of forty nine. Franklin McCain died
on January nine, fourteen, at the age of seventy three.
As of when we're recording this, Joseph McNeil and Jabral Kazan,
who was known during the sit ins as Ezel Blair Jr.
Are still living in our close friends. The Greensboro Woolworth
store closed in nineteen three. At that point, the Smithsonian
(33:34):
acquired a length of the lunch counter with four stools,
which is in the National Museum of American History. Also
in nineteen ninety three, an organization called sit In Movement
Incorporated was established to buy the Woolworth building and converted
into a museum today that is the International Civil Rights
Center and Museum. On February second of two thousand two,
(33:55):
a statue of the Greensboro four was unveiled in front
of Anti State University Dudley Building. It's modeled after the
photo that was taken to the foreman as they left
Woolworth on that first day of the sit ins. It's
inscription reads quote, these four A and T freshman envisioned
and carried out the lunch counter sit in of February one,
nineteen sixty in downtown Greensboro. Their courageous act against social
(34:18):
injustice inspired similar progress across the nation and is remembered
as a defining moment in the struggle for civil rights.
Do you have a little bit of listener mail for us?
I do um? It is actually a listener Facebook comment
from Alice that is about our recent episode on Murasaki
Shikibu and the Tale of Genji, and Alice says I
(34:41):
have a professional Japanese to English translator, so it was
fun to hear an episode that touched on translation. Han
Era Japanese is definitely difficult to translate and difficult for
today's Japanese person to read. The question of what the
subject or object of a specific Genji sentence is supposed
to be is something I've seen my Japanese colleagues argue
(35:02):
about pretty heatedly. But I should note that this what's
the subject slash object can under him didn't end with
flowery classical Japanese. Although a Japanese writer today will include
subjects and sentences more often than Murasaki Shikibu did, the
subject will still be left out. If a good half
of sentences and both spoken and written Japanese today, your
(35:24):
quote just supposed to know. So if you get a
bunch of translators in a room to analyze a book
or manga written in you'll still inevitably get to see
them argue over who or what some sentence or other
is really talking about. Thanks for covering, lady Murasaki. Thanks
for that note, Alice. That's pretty cool. I did not
realize that that was still as present in Japanese today. Um,
(35:48):
which is funny because I'm not trying to throw my
husband under the bus, but he speaks Japanese and has
lived in Japan and is a person that I will
ask various Japanese lange which things of from time to time.
And we were talking about that episode. I don't think
that particular detail about Japanese came up. It also reminds
(36:09):
me a bit of h A lot of authors that
I follow have talked about trying to um write their
work in a way that it works really well from
the page and also works really well as an audio book,
and a lot of times that involves leaving off the
attribution of like he said and she said in dialogue,
(36:31):
which as a reader you can pretty much keep up
with if you're paying attention, but also lead to some
similar moments of like who said that sentence right? And
the I mean I I know very little about Japanese language,
but my understanding too is that because of the syntax
of it is so different, sometimes it's just tricky. There's
(36:52):
no one to one to translate to English language, like,
there's really a lot of nuance and interpretation the the
interpreter has to do. Yeah, so yeah, so thank you again.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or at History Podcasts at I
Heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media
(37:12):
at mss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. You can also subscribe to our show on app, podcast,
the I Heart Radio app, and anywhere else you like
to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radios How Stuff Works.
(37:34):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the Greensboro lunch
Counter sit ins, and that was a critical moment in
(00:22):
the civil rights movement in the United States. On February
one of nineteen sixty four freshmen from Agricultural and Technical
College of North Carolina, which is now in North Carolina
A and T State University sat down at a segregated
lunch counter at the F. W. Woolworth's Five and Dime
in Greensboro, North Carolina. And on that first day, it
(00:43):
was just the four of them, but soon hundreds of
people were joining the demonstrations in downtown Greensboro, and sit
ins were also taking place in dozens of other cities
around the United States. This is frequently described as the
beginning of a movement, but really the Greensboro for cat
alized something that had been building in the years leading
up to that first day of sitting in. So that
(01:05):
is the story we're going to tell today for a
brief recap on where the Civil rights movement was in
nineteen sixty after the end of the reconstruction period that
followed the U. S. Civil War, many parts of the
United States established systems of racial segregation. This is often
discussed in the context of separating the black population from
the white population, but in parts of the country that
(01:26):
we're home to other racial and ethnic minorities, segregation targeted
those populations as well. The U. S. Supreme Court found
that this was legal as long as the separate facilities
were equal in its decision in plus e versus Ferguson
in eight six. We did an episode on plus e
versus Ferguson on February. Yeah, if you have been listening
(01:47):
to our show for a long time, none of this
is news to you, or if you've studied the civil
rights movement in other contexts, but we know not everyone has.
So people had been fighting for equal rights for racial
and ethnic minority use before Lessie versus Ferguson, and they
continued to do so afterward. But it wasn't until the
nineteen forties and fifties that some major changes really started
(02:08):
to happen in that regard. President Harry Truman issued Executive
Order one which desegregated the US Arms Services in nineteen.
That's come up in a lot of our previous episodes
that touch on the US military during World War Two.
In nineteen fifty four, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled
that public school segregation was unconstitutional in Brown versus Board
(02:30):
of Education of Topeka. Then the Montgomery bus boycott lasted
from December fifth nine to December twenty, nineteen fifty six.
The boycott led to another Supreme Court decision in which
the court upheld the ruling that Alabama state law requiring
segregated busses was also unconstitutional. We have two part episodes
(02:50):
on Brown versus Board and on the Montgomery bus boycott
in our archive as well. On September nine of nineteen
fifty seven, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed to the Will
Rights Act of nineteen fifty seven into law. The final
version of this law was a lot weaker than the
bill that was originally proposed, and South Carolina Senator Strom
(03:10):
Thurman filibustered for more than twenty four hours to try
to prevent it from being passed at all. Even so,
this was the first federal civil rights legislation passed since
the Reconstruction era, and it established a Commission on Civil
Rights as well as some basic voter rights protections. There was,
of course, a lot more to the civil rights movement
(03:31):
than just that, but these were some of the key
moments that we're just using to set the stage. And
after nineteen fifty seven, many civil rights leaders in the
US felt like the movement had started to stall. The
n double a c P, which had been established in
nineteen o nine, was still working primarily through legal strategies.
The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE, had been established
(03:52):
in nineteen forty two and was still focused on non
violent activism, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC
grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott and was formally
established in nineteen fifty seven. It helped coordinate and organize
among more local civil rights organizations across the US, also
with non violent activism. But while these and other organizations,
(04:15):
along with individual people, were still hard at work, it
just seemed like the movement wasn't seeing the visible activity
and forward steps that it had in previous years. The
Supreme Court's decision in Brown versus Board had also led
to a massive backlash in which many communities took extreme
steps to try to avoid integrating their schools. We talked
(04:36):
about that in those earlier episodes as well. Civil rights
advocates had faced intimidation, harassment, and violence throughout this movement,
and that was part of that backlash to brown versus
board as well. And this brings us to Greensboro, North Carolina,
a city first established in eighteen o eight. North Carolina
in general considered itself to be more racially progressive than
(04:57):
many of its neighbors, and this was a specially true
in Greensboro. Overall, the white majority thought that race relations
in the city were pretty good, especially compared to places
in the Deep South, it had become notorious for racism
and racist violence. Greensborough's kind of relative progressiveness and its
attitude on this was thanks in part to a large
(05:18):
Quaker community. As we've talked about on the show before,
the Religious Society of Friends became an active part of
the movement for the abolition of slavery, and it was
also part of the civil rights movement after that point.
That attitude was also connected to a large population of
students and academics thanks to the number of colleges and
universities in the city, the Society of Friends had established
(05:40):
New Garden Boarding School, which was the state's first co
educational boarding school, in eighteen thirty seven. The boarding school
was turned into a liberal arts college a few years
later and as Guilford College today. As Greensboro grew, its
educational institutions also came to include colleges and universities for
black students. This include had Bennett College, which was a
(06:01):
private college established for black women in eighteen seventy three.
What's now North Carolina Anti State University was established in
Raleigh as a and m college for the colored race
in eight one. It moved to Greensboro in eighteen nine three.
By the start of the twentieth century, Greensboro was home
to five colleges and universities, three for white students and
(06:23):
two for black students. Charlotte Hawkins Brown also established the
Palmer Memorial Institute, which was a prep school for black students,
and that was outside the city proper, established in nineteen
o two. So all of this was contributing to that
overall sense that Greensboro was sort of a a nice
place to be in forward thinking and things were pretty
good there, uh, and that idea that Greensboro was pretty
(06:47):
forward thinking on race continued into the civil rights movement.
On May eighteenth of nineteen fifty four, the day after
the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown
versus Board of Education, the Greensboro School Board publicly announced
its intention to comply with the ruling. This made it
the first city in the Southeast to make that kind
of public announcement, but actually following through with that announcement
(07:10):
was another story. It took three years before any black
students were enrolled at a previously all white school in Greensboro,
and for many years after that, school integration was really
a token effort. It took well over a decade before
Greensboro schools were really integrated, and as has been the
case in so many parts of the US, patterns of
(07:30):
segregation have gradually returned since then. So by nineteen sixty,
even though Greensboro's white leadership thought of itself as a
fair and just city where race relations were overall positive,
school desegregation was barely getting started, and a lot of
other public facilities were still segregated as well. The golf
courses had been integrated thanks to a demonstration that started
(07:53):
on December seven, nineteen fifty five, when six black men
were arrested while playing a round of golf at Greensboro's
Why it's only Gillespie Golf Course, But the swimming pools
were still segregated in spite of demonstrations led by Edward Edmonds,
who taught sociology at Bennett College. Also still segregated were
restaurants and the more casual lunch counters found in variety
(08:14):
stores and drug stores. That's what students in Greensboro we're
trying to change in nineteen sixty. More about that after
a sponsor break. Sitens like the ones that were carried
out in Greensboro in nineteen sixty are a form of
direct action. This is a term that was coined in
(08:36):
the early twentieth century to describe actions like Boycott's or strikes,
which are meant to help the demonstrators reached their goals
directly in the most efficient and effective way possible. Although
direct action isn't always nonviolent, the direct action employed during
a lot of the Civil rights movement generally was sit ins.
As a form of non violent direct action date back
(08:58):
earlier than the Civil rights its movement, though one of
its precursors is the sit down strike. We have talked
about a number of strikes that were part of the
labor movement in the US and Europe in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and for many of these, striking workers picketed, demonstrated,
held rallies, and tried to block replacement workers from getting
into their workplace from outside. A sit down strike was different.
(09:22):
Striking workers took over their workplaces and sat down inside,
sometimes right at their workstations. One of the first large
scale sit down strikes was the Flint sit down strike,
which started on December nine, thirty six, but it followed
other smaller strikes at other factories. General Motors workers in Flint,
Michigan went on strike for recognition of the United Auto
(09:44):
Workers as their collective bargaining agent and for better pay,
grievance procedures, other workplace rights and protections, the same types
of things that we've generally talked about in these previous episodes.
Striking workers stopped working, locked themselves in the bill holding
and sat down at their stations, and this effectively shut
down the plant. The striking workers weren't working and replacement
(10:07):
workers couldn't get into work either. Within a few years,
civil rights activists had adopted a similar strategy in the
fight for racial equality. A restaurant could not make any
money if all of its seats were being occupied by
black customers who the restaurant was refusing to serve, or
supporters of other races who were taking up space but
refusing to place their orders unless the restaurants served those
(10:29):
black customers who were waiting. Of course, picketing, rallies and
other demonstrations, as well as legal actions and other tactics
could be part of this kind of demonstration as well.
There was at least one sit in style demonstration that
happened earlier than this to protest segregation in another context,
but when it comes to food service specifically, the first
(10:50):
documented sit ins protesting segregation happened in nine with multiple
protests taking place that year. Polly Murray, who was a
law student how University, organized a stool sitting by Howard
students to protest segregation at the Little Palace cafeteria in Washington,
d C. Along with her other work and civil rights activism,
(11:11):
Murray went on to become the first African American woman
to become an episcopal priest. Students at Howard also sat
in at the United Cigar Store in Washington, d C.
In ninety three after Ruth Powell, Marian Musgrave, and Wanting
to Morrow experienced discrimination there. These three sophomores had ordered
hot chocolate, and at first they were refused service. The
(11:33):
staff at United Cigar Store called the police. The police
say they didn't have any grounds to remove these three women,
so they were served their hot chocolate, but when the
bill came, they had been charged twenty five cents each
rather than the actual price of ten cents. When they
refused to pay that extra amount, they were arrested. Howard
Student Chapter of the n double a CP organized a
(11:56):
protest of the United Cigar Company and of DC area
restaurants in the hope of ending their discriminatory practices and
of getting civil rights legislation passed. In this case, the
students at Howard ended their demonstrations after a lot of deliberation,
at the request of Dr Mordecai W. Johnson, who was
president of the university. This started out as more of
(12:17):
a temporary request for the students to suspend their protest
while the university figured out what its policies were regarding
this kind of off campus demonstration, but the students eventually
decided to stop the protest entirely because of the possibility
of the university losing its federal funding. Since Howard is
in Washington, d C. There were concerns that legislators might
(12:39):
feel like the student's behavior was antagonizing them and cut
off the school's budget. By that point, though, the students
had gotten some of the restaurants in Washington, d C.
To stop their segregation policies, but they hadn't reached the
goal of trying to get civil rights legislation passed. Activists
in Chicago held sit ins in nineteen as well. Jack
(13:00):
Sprats Coffeehouse in Chicago had a reputation for treating black
customers with rudeness and hostility, or denying them service outright.
This included refusing service to James Farmer. In ninety two,
Farmer helped organize inter racial groups, each with at least
one black member, to take up seats at the diner.
They'd all refused to leave until their black member was served.
(13:23):
The Committee of Racial Equality, which became the Congress of
Racial Equality, grew out of this experience, with Farmer as
one of its founders. These are just examples from that
first documented year of sit ins to protest segregation, and
sit ins continued to be organized and multiple cities throughout
the nineteen forties and fifties. In the three years leading
(13:44):
up to the Greensboro sit ins of nineteen sixty there
were organized sit ins and at least fifteen cities. Many
of them were organized by Core, either alone or working
in conjunction with the Double A c P, although other
community and church groups organized sit ins during those three
years as well. This included sit ins in North Carolina.
On June nineteen fifty seven, the Reverend Douglas Moore and
(14:08):
six others were arrested at the Royal Ice Cream Parlor
in Durham, North Carolina for sitting in the whites only section.
Just as sit ins were not a brand new phenomenon
in nineteen sixty, A and T also had a long
history of student political involvement and demonstrations by that point,
something that is of course true of a lot of
other college campuses. Students had demonstrated, gone on strike, they
(14:32):
had taken other actions in response to everything from administrative
policies that they wanted to change to the quality of
the food in the cafeteria. In nineteen A and T
students disrupted a speech by then North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges,
who was in favor of voluntary segregation and whose language
in that speech was belittling and racist. These demonstrations weren't
(14:53):
limited to things related to campus life. In ninety seven,
students from A and T boycotted Green Burrows movie theaters
over the practice of deleting scenes with black characters from films.
The theaters also required black patrons to enter through a
separate door and to sit in a separate section. Based
on the history of political activism at the school, it's
(15:15):
being about an hour away from Durham, and the overall
interconnectedness of civil rights activists in the nineteen fifties, it's
likely that students at A and T had heard about
the demonstrations in Durham and elsewhere. The Greensboro sit ins
started with four freshmen who became known as the Greensboro Four.
These were Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Eazel
(15:38):
Blair Jr. Who later became known as Jabrel Kazan. Some
of them had known one another when they were in
high school at Dudley High School in Greensboro before they
started college. In college, the four of them had become
very close friends. They were all politically active and aware,
and they tended to have conversations in the dorm late
into the night about topics like civil rights and racial justice.
(15:59):
But the ration they cited for their sit in was
the treatment Joseph McNeil received while traveling back to campus
by bus after the winter break in nineteen sixty. McNeil
had been born in North Carolina, but had moved to
New York with his family before returning to Greensboro to
attend A and T. He traveled between New York and
Greensboro by bus. On these trips, he saw firsthand how
(16:22):
his treatment changed based on how far south he had traveled.
On this strip back to the school in nineteen sixty,
he was denied service at a restaurant at a Greyhound
bus station, and from there he decided to change things.
He convinced his three classmates that they should sit in
at the F. W. Woolworth counter in downtown Greensboro. They
set a date for doing this of February one. Although
(16:43):
black customers were allowed to shop at the Woolworth Store.
They could only buy food there at a stand up
snack bar, not at the lunch counter, which had actual seating.
In later years, all four men talked about being terrified
of what could happen to them if they did this.
All of them vividly remembered the nine lynching of Emmett Till,
(17:03):
who had been brutally beaten and murdered after a white
woman said that he had whistled at and physically accosted her.
She later admitted that this was false, and we talked
more about that in detail in our seen episode titled
The Motherhood of Mamie Till Mobley. Apart from the inherent
horror of this murder, the Greensboro four were about the
same age as Emmett had been when he was killed,
(17:24):
so they were absolutely aware that they were putting themselves
at risk in doing this, as was the case with
the people who took on all of those earlier sit ins.
On the afternoon of Monday, February one, they met up
at Blueford Library on the Anti campus, wearing their Sunday best.
McCain was in his r OTC uniform because he hadn't
had time to change. They did not expect that they
(17:48):
would be coming back to campus that day. As McCain
described it later on, quote, if I were lucky, I
would go to jail for a long long time. If
I were not quite so lucky, I would come back
to my campus, but in a pine box. This was
also really personal for the four of them. Also, in
McCain's words from later in his life, quote manhood and dignity.
(18:08):
That's what we were trying to get. We didn't go
down to Woolworth to change the world. It was about
a fifteen minute walk from the campus to Woolworth, and
once they got there, they each bought a few small
necessities in the store, and they kept their receipts so
that they could prove that they were customers. Then they
took seats at the lunch counter. The staff refused to
serve them and told them to leave, but they stayed put,
(18:29):
showing their receipts and asking why they could spend their
money in the store but not at the lunch counter.
In their accounts, a black food service worker also told
them to leave, saying that they shouldn't cause trouble. In
later years, the men also told slightly different versions of
their encounter with an older white woman that first day
that she either said that she was proud of them
(18:50):
for what they were doing and asked why it had
taken so long, or some versions suggest that she was
disappointed in them because it had taken so long. Finally,
the store manager, Clarence Harris, known as Curly, decided the
best course of action was to close the store early.
When the four young men left, they said they would
be back the next day. When they got back to campus,
(19:11):
they formed a student Executive Committee for Justice to try
to keep themselves and their classmates focused and to make
sure anyone who joined the sit in understood their standards
for dress, behavior and non violence. They were to be
neatly and nicely dressed, with men in coats and ties
and women in dresses, stockings, and heels. They were to
be gracious and polite, including not talking back if they
(19:34):
were insulted or sworn at. We will have more on
this after another quick sponsor break. When they planned their
sit in at the Woolworth lunch counter, the Greensboro four
had the support of Ralph John's, who was a white
business owner who opposed segregation. John's contacted the local press
(19:58):
while they were sitting in. Photographer Jack Mobes of the
Greensboro Record took a photo of the four young men
on their way out of the store. The newspapers started
covering the sit in right away. More reporters were on
hand on February two, and the student demonstrators had grown
from their those first four people to a total of
about twenty. On Wednesday, the third, more than sixty students
(20:20):
were sitting at the lunch counter. Crowd started forming before
the store opened, with black students and white counter protesters,
each trying to fill all of the seats at the
lunch counter. White opponents to the sit in included members
of the Ku Klux Klan. There is a documentary on
this called February one, and they tell stories about this
(20:42):
kind of rush to try to get all the seats. Uh.
And in some cases, like the white people who sat
down were trying to keep the demonstrators from sitting down.
But then in other cases it was more like people
would sit down and us the you know, the staff
would come over to take their order and they would say,
think he was here before me actually, and sort of
(21:03):
claimed the space in that way. So there was a
lot going on, uh. In terms of this rush for
seats at the lunch counter. Women were also involved in
this protest from its earliest days. Like A and T.
Bennett College had a long and established history of civil
rights activism among its student body, including being part of
the earlier Greensboro demonstrations that we talked about before the break.
(21:27):
Women from Bennett who were nicknamed Bennett Bells are referenced
in news reports from the fourth day of the demonstration,
but they were probably there earlier. Bennett students were also
a big part of the sit ins ongoing planning, and
hundreds of them sat in at the lunch counters over
the course of the sit ins. News reports also mentioned
white women from Women's College which is now You and
(21:48):
c G who joined. On the third day. On Thursday,
February fourth, more than three hundred people made their way
to downtown Greensboro, and the sit in spread from the
Woolworth lunch counter to the counter at the nearby S. H.
Crest store. The sit ins became national news, and people
started organizing sit ins at lunch counters in other cities.
(22:09):
Nationally televised news coverage was one of the reasons that
the Greensboro sit in sparked a more national movement when
those earlier sit ins that we talked about really hadn't.
But it was also because by nineteen sixty most major
cities were home to church leaders and civil rights activists
who were trained in non violence and direct action. So
when words started to spread of what was happening in Greensboro,
(22:31):
people in other cities were already ready to go. People
started picketing and boycotting at northern Woolworth locations that weren't
segregating their lunch counters as well to try to get
the whole chain to change its policies. On Friday, February five,
the Greensboro sit in saw its first arrests, with three
white men arrested for intimidation after setting a black man's
(22:52):
coat on fire at the counter. Then, on February six,
both Woolworth and Cress closed due to a bomb threat.
The student demonstrators agreed to a two week truce while
the stores tried to work out a desegregation plan. As
that was happening, siden started in Winston Salem, about thirty
miles from Greensboro on February eighth. February, students and civil
(23:15):
rights leaders from Nashville Christian Leadership Conference started sitting in
at restaurants in Nashville, Tennessee. This was actually something they
had already been working on. Just a few days before
the Greensboro sit in started. Black students had visited lunch
counters in Nashville to confirm that they would not be
served there. As part of their planning of a series
of sit ins. More than a hundred and twenties students
(23:38):
from American Baptist College, Fisk University, and Tennessee A and
I State University sat in at three Nashville stores, all
of which wound up closing early on that first day.
One of the student demonstrators in Nashville was John Lewis,
who was a student at American Baptist College at the time.
On February sixteenth, Martin Luther King Jr. Spoke at White
Rock Baptist Church and during North Carolina. Afterwards, some of
(24:02):
the Greensborough demonstrators were able to meet him, and he
expressed his support for what they were doing. King also
credited the Greensboro sit ins with reinvigorating the movement. People,
mostly students, kept organizing sit ins and more and more cities,
most of them in the South. We are not at
all touching on all of them. These are just some examples.
On February, students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, sat in at
(24:26):
the Crest lunch counter. On February seven, the number of
student demonstrators in Nashville, Tennessee, swelled to four hundred. They
were attacked by white counter protesters that day. The demonstrating
students were beaten and burned with cigarettes, and eighty one
of them were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, even
(24:47):
though they were not the instigators and had not fought back.
The arrested students bail was set at a hundred dollars,
but they opted to remain in jail even after that
amount was lowered. That actually was a strategy and a
lot to this movement, that to choose jail rather than bail.
One of the organizers of the Nashville sit ins was
the Reverend James Lawson, who was pursuing graduate studies at
(25:09):
the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt's divinity program was integrated.
Lawson had been incarcerated as a conscientious objector during the
Korean War and had studied Gandhi's principles of non violent
activism in India. The media in Nashville framed him as
an outside agitator who was advocating lawlessness. On March three,
(25:31):
the Board of trust at Vanderbilt met to discuss the situation,
and they ultimately offered him the choice of withdrawing from
the Divinity School or being expelled, and he chose expulsion,
which led to widespread student demonstrations at Vanderbilt and the
resignations of nearly all the Divinity School faculty. On March fifteen,
about a thousand students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, held a
(25:54):
march to protest segregation in Orangeburg and to support the
sit ins that were happening in other parts of South Carolina.
On March seven, students from Southern University sat in at
the Crest Counter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. All of them
were arrested and their bail was set at fifteen hundred
dollars each. Civil rights leader Reverend T. J. Jemison headed
(26:15):
the effort to raise funds for them. The next day,
there were sit ins at Steimond's drug store in Baton Rouge,
as well as the Greyhound station, and students from Southern
University walked out of class to march to the capitol.
Sixteen students were arrested and suspended from school. Many were convicted,
with the U. S. Supreme Court overturning those convictions. Later
on on April one, sit ins and other demonstrations resumed
(26:39):
in Greensboro. That two weeks suspension and demonstrations had dragged on,
it had become clear that these negotiations to actually integrate
the lunch counters were going nowhere. Demonstrators also started asking
people to boycott the downtown stores, and even people who
didn't support integration had started avoiding the whole area because
of the sit ins the other demonstrations. On that same day,
(27:02):
students from Burke High School sat in at the Crest
lunch Counter in Charleston, South Carolina. This demonstration lasted for
only a day, as all of the students who participated
were arrested in Double A CP Branch president Jay Arthur
Brown paid their bail of ten dollars each. Also in April,
Ella Baker, who was active in the Double A c
(27:23):
P and had helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
held a meeting for student activists at Shaw University and Raleigh.
The result of that meeting was the establishment of the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee or SNICK. SNICK has its
own history beyond this sit in movement. Parts of that
history are contentious, but it became a major organization in
(27:44):
the civil rights movement in the nineteen sixties, especially when
it came to young people's activism. On April nineteenth, in Nashville,
the home of the student demonstrator's defense lawyer was bombed,
causing extensive damage to it and the surrounding buildings, but
thankfully not causing any injury. These are deaths. In response,
students led a silent march of about three thousand people.
(28:06):
The day after the march, Martin Luther King Jr. Spoke
at Fisk University, and that address was also delayed because
of the bomb threats. On May tenth, nearly all the
stores that students had targeted in Nashville started integrating their
lunch counters. Back in Greensboro, Kress had closed its lunch
counter entirely for a while to try to avoid this
whole situation, and when it reopened, it roped off the
(28:28):
counter to try to allow staff to control who could
or couldn't get in when black students walked past the
rope and sat down anyway. Police arrested more than forty people,
including three of the Greensboro four. At this point, the
end of the academic year was approaching, and in some cities,
store owners and local authorities we're hoping that things would
(28:48):
kind of just blow over, or at least calm down
when students went home for the summer. In Greensboro, Curly
Harris had gotten a memo from Woolworth's regional headquarters to
integrate the lunch counter, but had left it up to
him as to when to do it, and so he
decided to do it on July, when school was no
longer in session. He chose four employees, Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison,
(29:11):
and Nathan Jones and Charles Best to be the first
black customers served at the lunch counter. He asked them
to bring a change of clothes with them to work
that day so they would be in street clothes when
they ate. He also advised them that if they did
not want their picture in the paper, they should eat
as quickly as they could. Those are the names that
I have found for the four employees, but there are
some sources that you'll find that say it was three
(29:32):
employees rather than four. When college students returned in the fall,
some did go to the store to test out whether
integration really was happening at the lunch counter, but it
did not become like the go to place for students
that been at or A and T to eat. By
the end of nineteen sixty, there had been sit ins
in at least one hundred cities and at least seventy
thousand people had participated. A year after that initial February
(29:56):
first protest, at least one hundred forty cities had desegregated
their lunch counters, both in response to sit ins in
those cities and also out of fear that they could
be targeted next. This wasn't at all the end of
the sit in movement. The sit ins are often credited
with reviving the civil rights movement, as we've mentioned earlier,
and they're also credited with training a new generation of
(30:18):
civil rights activists who participated in them. Moving beyond nineteen sixty,
students and others started turning their focus to things like
segregated movie theaters, restaurants, and other facilities. Those demonstrations were
met with similar waves of counter demonstrations, arrests, and violence.
This included wade ends in Biloxi, Mississippi, which started in
(30:40):
nineteen fifty nine and then recurred several times through nineteen
sixty three, although it was another four years after that
before a federal appeals court ruled that the public beaches
had to desegregate. Back at the top of the show,
we mentioned school desegregation and bus desegregation. In those cases,
the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled their racial segregation
(31:01):
in public schools and state laws requiring bus segregation were unconstitutional,
but the Supreme Court did not make a similar ruling
about privately owned businesses that are also open to the public,
such as movie theaters, stores, and lunch counters. Between nineteen
sixty one and nineteen sixty four, waves of appeals made
their way to the U. S. Supreme Court as students
(31:22):
fought their convictions for trespassing, disturbing the peace, and similar
charges in conjunction with their involvements in the sit in movement.
For the most part, the Supreme Court found in favor
of the students in these cases and overturned their convictions,
but the Court generally did so on pretty narrow grounds.
The decisions cited things like procedural issues or, in some cases,
(31:44):
local or state non discrimination laws that had been passed
since the students were first convicted. The Supreme Court really
did not answer the broader constitutional question in these rulings. However,
in nineteen sixty four, President Didn't be Johnson signed the
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, which was legislation
that President John F. Kennedy had advocated before his assassination
(32:08):
in nineteen sixty three. This Act outlawed discrimination on the
basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It
also required equal access to public places and employment regardless
of race, among other protections. Of course, this did not
fix racism or discrimination, but it was the nation's first
(32:29):
broad civil rights law since the Reconstruction era, offering more
protections than the Civil Rights Act of nineteen fifty seven had.
Regarding the Greensboro four, after they graduated from ant all
of them found it difficult to get work in Greensboro
because of their involvement in the sit ins. All of them,
except for David Richmond, ultimately left the city. Richmond sent
(32:51):
spent a few years living in western North Carolina before
going back to Greensboro to take care of his aging parents.
Even then, when years had passed, he struggled to find work,
and he faced ongoing issues with his physical and mental health,
as well as alcohol abuse, which the people around him
attributed to the way he had been traded for his
civil rights work. He died on December seventh of nineteen
(33:12):
ninety at the age of forty nine. Franklin McCain died
on January nine, fourteen, at the age of seventy three.
As of when we're recording this, Joseph McNeil and Jabral Kazan,
who was known during the sit ins as Ezel Blair Jr.
Are still living in our close friends. The Greensboro Woolworth
store closed in nineteen three. At that point, the Smithsonian
(33:34):
acquired a length of the lunch counter with four stools,
which is in the National Museum of American History. Also
in nineteen ninety three, an organization called sit In Movement
Incorporated was established to buy the Woolworth building and converted
into a museum today that is the International Civil Rights
Center and Museum. On February second of two thousand two,
(33:55):
a statue of the Greensboro four was unveiled in front
of Anti State University Dudley Building. It's modeled after the
photo that was taken to the foreman as they left
Woolworth on that first day of the sit ins. It's
inscription reads quote, these four A and T freshman envisioned
and carried out the lunch counter sit in of February one,
nineteen sixty in downtown Greensboro. Their courageous act against social
(34:18):
injustice inspired similar progress across the nation and is remembered
as a defining moment in the struggle for civil rights.
Do you have a little bit of listener mail for us?
I do um? It is actually a listener Facebook comment
from Alice that is about our recent episode on Murasaki
Shikibu and the Tale of Genji, and Alice says I
(34:41):
have a professional Japanese to English translator, so it was
fun to hear an episode that touched on translation. Han
Era Japanese is definitely difficult to translate and difficult for
today's Japanese person to read. The question of what the
subject or object of a specific Genji sentence is supposed
to be is something I've seen my Japanese colleagues argue
(35:02):
about pretty heatedly. But I should note that this what's
the subject slash object can under him didn't end with
flowery classical Japanese. Although a Japanese writer today will include
subjects and sentences more often than Murasaki Shikibu did, the
subject will still be left out. If a good half
of sentences and both spoken and written Japanese today, your
(35:24):
quote just supposed to know. So if you get a
bunch of translators in a room to analyze a book
or manga written in you'll still inevitably get to see
them argue over who or what some sentence or other
is really talking about. Thanks for covering, lady Murasaki. Thanks
for that note, Alice. That's pretty cool. I did not
realize that that was still as present in Japanese today. Um,
(35:48):
which is funny because I'm not trying to throw my
husband under the bus, but he speaks Japanese and has
lived in Japan and is a person that I will
ask various Japanese lange which things of from time to time.
And we were talking about that episode. I don't think
that particular detail about Japanese came up. It also reminds
(36:09):
me a bit of h A lot of authors that
I follow have talked about trying to um write their
work in a way that it works really well from
the page and also works really well as an audio book,
and a lot of times that involves leaving off the
attribution of like he said and she said in dialogue,
(36:31):
which as a reader you can pretty much keep up
with if you're paying attention, but also lead to some
similar moments of like who said that sentence right? And
the I mean I I know very little about Japanese language,
but my understanding too is that because of the syntax
of it is so different, sometimes it's just tricky. There's
(36:52):
no one to one to translate to English language, like,
there's really a lot of nuance and interpretation the the
interpreter has to do. Yeah, so yeah, so thank you again.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or at History Podcasts at I
Heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media
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at mss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. You can also subscribe to our show on app, podcast,
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