BLACK HISTORY
Anniversary of historic sit-ins
By Monica Moorehead
On Feb. 1, 1960, four African American first-year students
from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in
Greensboro sat down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter.
For decades Black people had been allowed to come into the
store only to purchase items and food to take out.
The four--Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (now Jibreel
Khazan), Joseph McNeil and David Richmond--were refused
service. Undaunted, the four students continued to sit and
study their school lessons until closing time.
The next day the lunch counter was closed. But the students
came back anyway.
This time they were 20 strong. The next day their number
grew to 80.
Before the end of the week, hundreds were protesting this
racist policy--including some whites from the Women's College
of the University of North Carolina.
This historic sit-down is considered the spark for the
sit-down movement carried out by African Americans struggling
to desegregate all public accommodations in the South. Other
African American students throughout the South embarked on
their own campaigns to break the Jim Crow segregation of
restaurants, movie theaters, hotels and other public
places.
Within the next 18 months, according to the Southern
Regional Council, an estimated 70,000 anti-racist
forces--mostly African American students --had participated in
sit-downs throughout the South. More than 3,600 had been jailed
for their actions and many were refused bail until their court
dates came up.
Due to this tidal wave of mass protest--which included
African American community boycotts of white-owned
businesses--over 100 Southern communities were forced to
desegregate one or more of their eating accommodations before
the federal Civil Rights Bill was passed in 1964.
Nashville, Tenn., was the first city forced to desegregate
its lunch counters. Greensboro followed suit on July 25,
1960.
These massive sit-ins did not take place within a vacuum.
They were part and parcel of a growing tide of civil-rights
struggle throughout the South against Jim Crow laws, an
outgrowth of slavery.
Less than five years before Greensboro--on Dec. 1, 1955--the
Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott began when a Black woman, Rosa
Parks, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.
One year later, the city of Montgomery was forced to end its
policy of segregation on public transportation.
The bus boycott got a boost from the historic 1954 Supreme
Court Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which characterized
the segregation of schools as unconstitutional.
Just as the Montgomery bus boycott inspired the students in
Greensboro, out of the sit-in movement came the founding of the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which supported
students fighting against racism in both the South and the
North.
Today, many of the gains of the powerful mass movements
against racism are under siege by an emboldened right wing. It
will take renewed social movements of all those who recognize
racism as their enemy to defend and expand affirmative action,
defend undocumented workers, stop the execution of Mumia
Abu-Jamal and fight national oppression in all its forms.
The anti-racist movement of today can draw its inspiration
from four courageous African American students who sat in at a
segregated lunch counter 39 years ago, and in doing so helped
usher in a wave of long-overdue justice.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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