Sit-Ins

,African American student protest movement in 1960, in which black students occupied "white-only" lunch counters and other segregated public institutions throughout the South to protest segregated seating.

On February 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at a "white-only" department store lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. This Woolworth's counter was but one of the many segregated public facilities in the Southern United States where African Americans were prohibited from activities such as eating, swimming, and drinking by whites who not only opposed equal treatment of the races but feared any possibility of bodily contact.

When the restaurant refused these students service, they remained seated until the store closed for the evening. The students returned each morning for the next five days to occupy the lunch counter, joined by a group of protesters that grew to the hundreds. Faced by a mob of angry white residents and management that refused to serve them a cup of coffee, the students maintained their protest until they forced the store to close its doors.

The protest by Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, and David Richmand marked the beginning of a grassroots sit-in movement led by African American students against the segregated public spaces of the South. Black or racially integrated groups of students would sit down in white-only spaces and refuse to move until they were served or forcibly removed. By the end of 1960, about 70,000 black students had participated in a sit-in or marched in support of the demonstrators.

Although there had been a few sit-in protests before 1960, including two in 1943, the mass mobilization of 1960 was new. Few in the economically struggling black community of the South had been willing to undertake these types of direct action protests, since they would be in danger of losing their jobs after an arrest. Black students generally had fewer financial responsibilities than their older counterparts, and they were interested in forcing change more immediate than that promised by the legal reform advocated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In 1960, as African American students entered the political arena in large numbers for the first time, the character of civil rights protesting began to change. Influenced by the successful protests led by Mohandas K. Gandhi in India's Independence Movement, black students saw the potential for using nonviolent resistance to undermine the system and thinking of segregation. Nonviolence was not just a strategy, although it did garner sympathy from many whites and the national press, it was a moral and revolutionary philosophy. Proponents such as James Lawson saw nonviolence as an "invincible instrument of war," imbued with "soul force" and moral integrity, that used the mass organization of bodies to strike at the heart of the morally unsound system of segregationism.

The pivotal demonstration was the Greensboro sit-in. But students had already begun organizing elsewhere. Shortly after the Greensboro protest, Lawson and the Nashville Student Movement launched a well-organized and orchestrated campaign to integrate the lunch counters of Nashville, Tennessee. In less than a month, Nashville yielded to the pressure of the protests. The success of these original protests inspired other black students throughout the South, who organized sit-ins to force the desegregation of public places.

During 1960 sit-ins began to break down the segregation of the upper South, and lunch counters were integrated in cities in Texas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The reasons for integration were economic as well as moral. Boycotters, both black and white, supported the protesters, and many merchants did not want to lose the revenue of customers.
In the Deep South, however, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, white supremacy was more entrenched in the community and local government. Cities such as Montgomery, Alabama, outlawed the demonstrations, and white store owners refused to serve blacks under the rationale that they could make the rules on their own private property.

Throughout the South, protesters faced not only arrest but vigilante violence as police and the Ku Klux Klan worked hand in hand to suppress the protests. By the end of 1960, 36,000 students had been arrested and thousands were expelled from college.

With support from African American activist Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), students formed a permanent organization in April 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC maintained the autonomy of the grassroots students' movement and facilitated training in nonviolent resistance. The strategy of occupying a place as a means of nonviolent protest gained currency in the Civil Rights Movement. Sit-ins at lunch counters inspired similar forms of protest at other types of segregated facilities, such as wade-ins at swimming places.

The efficacy of nonviolent resistance was one of the most important legacies of the 1960 sit-in protests. Segregation was seen to be a moral as well as a legal issue, and the dignity of blacks in the face of white supremacist rage went far to win white and black support for the movement. In the words of the founding members of SNCC, "By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities."