50 Years Ago Today, The Start Of Civil Rights Sit-Ins

[supernova]

On February 1, 50 years ago, four African American freshman at North Carolina AT&T sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth's and ordered a coffee, NPR reports.

The students had intentionally breached color lines at a lunch counter barred from African Americans. Flustered, the manager shut the restaurant down.

But the idea caught on. The next day four students turned into twenty-five, then twenty-five into sixty-three, sixty-three into three hundred. Likewise, one city became two, two cities became three, three cities became thirty by March first. Within a few months, the sit-ins had spread to more than seventy southern cities and fifty thousand people. The sit-ins changed the course of the civil rights movement.
The sit-ins also inspired the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which in turn supported every great civil rights advance of the next few years, including Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer, the marches in Birmingham and Selma, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/01/50-years-ago-today-the-st_n_444605.html

International Civil Rights Center and Museum: http://www.sitinmovement.org/home.asp

[unc70]

1. Much of white NC was willing to change

That was a pivotal time for NC. While things got rather tense and there were lots of racists in NC in 1960, many whites had reached the point of supporting the demise of segregation although relatively few were active in their support. The 1960 election Terry Sanford for Governor of NC and NC voting for Kennedy for President were related indicators. NC would remove most of the strictures of segregation over the next couple of years with relatively little of the violence that plagued most Southern and many Northern states.

By chance a couple of weeks later, I witnessed one of the sit-ins in another NC town. I was eleven and too interested; at least that was what my mother thought, but she had my two much-younger siblings with us to worry about and was annoyed that I had gone off to see what was happening.

[struggle4progress]

2. knr!