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Students from
North Carolina A&T College stage a sit-in protest at the F.W.
Woolworth lunch counter on Feb. 2, 1960.

UPI

Updated

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CONNECTIONS TO A MOVEMENT

Four generations have witnessed change.

Tell your story; help solve cold cases.
Click
here for more on civil rights in
America.

SIT-IN TIMELINE

The lunch counter sit-in movement began Feb. 1, 1960,
in Greensboro, N.C. By the end of March, the movement
had spread to more than 55 cities in 13 states. Among
the cities and colleges and universities whose students
participated:

Date

City

College

Feb. 1

Greensboro, N.C.

North Carolina A&T
College

Feb. 8

Durham, N.C.

North Carolina College

Feb. 8

Fayetteville, N.C.

Fayetteville State Teachers
College

Feb. 8

Winston-Salem, N.C.

Winston-Salem Teachers College

Feb. 9

Charlotte

Johnson C. Smith University

Feb. 10

Raleigh, N.C.

Saint Augustine's College, Shaw
University

Feb. 11

Hampton, Va.

Hampton Institute

Feb. 12

Rock Hill, S.C.

Clinton Junior College

Feb. 13

Nashville

Fisk University

Feb. 13

Tallahassee, Fla.

Florida A&M University

Feb. 20

Richmond, Va.

Virginia Union University

Feb. 22

Baltimore

Coppin State Teachers
College

Feb. 24

Montgomery, Ala.

Alabama State College

Feb. 26

Tuskegee, Ala.

Tuskegee Institute

March 2

Daytona Beach, Fla.

Bethune-Cookman College

March 4

Houston

Texas Southern University

March 8

New Orleans

Dillard University, Southern
University

March 15

Atlanta

Clark University, Morehouse
College, Morris Brown College, Spelman
College

Source: International Civil Rights Center and
Museum, Greensboro,
N.C.

Sit-ins
reignited the civil rights movement 50 years ago

By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY

NASHVILLE — Fifth Avenue downtown bustles with
activity on a blustery recent afternoon. People of all races mingle: This
could be any midsize city in the United
States, circa 2010.

Fifty years ago, things were different. The stores
along Fifth — specifically, their lunch counters — and the city itself
were the site of a battle that also played out in dozens of other cities
in the South.

The fight pitted black college students and a few of
their white peers against the city's white power structure and its
downtown merchants over the right to sit down and eat lunch. At the time,
blacks could spend money in those stores but couldn't eat at the stores'
lunch counters.

The lunch counter of 1960 was the equivalent of
fast-food restaurants today. Hamburger chains were just beginning to
appear on the American landscape. Ray Kroc had
opened his first McDonald's
about five years earlier; Burger King had gone national just the year
before. People wanting a sandwich or a hamburger popped over to the lunch
counter of department stores, drugstores and five-and-dime stores to have
a bite.

Except black people.

State and local ordinances known as Jim Crow laws in
at least 11 Southern
states prohibited interracial interaction in most areas of public life
— restaurants, schools, courtrooms, buses and trains, movie theaters, even
reform schools.

Starting 50 years ago Monday, students across the
South decided to change that.

The tactic they chose was simple: They sat at lunch
counters and waited to be served. The stores refused to serve them, and
the students were arrested and hauled off to jail, sometimes after being
beaten and spat on by white mobs.

The tactic became known as sit-ins, and in 1960, tens
of thousands of students across the South were doing it — protesting
racial discrimination that had scarred their parents, risking their
futures to try to ensure a better one for their children.

Perhaps 100,000 students participated in sit-ins,
says historian Clayborne Carson; 3,000 were arrested in 1960 alone.

SIT-IN STORIES: Readers
share how they took a seat for justice

CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICA: Connections
to a movement

VIDEO: International
Civil Rights Musem opens

MLK JR. DAY: Focus
on service, progress

CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM: Speaking
for the Greensboro Four

Their story is drawing renewed attention as Black
History Month begins and a new museum celebrating the transformation of
America from the sit-ins to the election of President Obama opens
Monday.

"Had not all of that transpired, we would not have
had the victory of 2008," says Amelia Parker, 61, executive director of
the new International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, N.C.,
where the sit-ins began.

The sit-ins — and the students they attracted —
reinvigorated Martin
Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement, which had begun to flag after
the success of the Rosa Parks-inspired Montgomery bus boycott of
1955-56.

"The sit-ins were the real starting point of the
protests of the 1960s," Carson
says.

"After Montgomery, King hadn't been able to sustain
momentum. The sit-ins took the initiative away from King and the NAACP.
You had these students, in some ways, leading King," says Carson, director
of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford
University and head of the Morehouse
College King Collection.

The protests would groom a new generation of black
leaders, and they would provide inspiration for movements that followed,
says Reavis Mitchell, history department chairman at Fisk
University here.

"The sit-ins had, and they continue to have, a
tremendous impact," he says.

Nashville: The prelude

Among Southern cities, Nashville in 1960 was
relatively moderate in matters of race.

It called itself "The Athens of the South" because of
its many colleges and universities. The City Council was integrated, and
the white mayor, Ben West, was considered progressive by many black
residents.

But Nashville was a segregated city.

"It was as segregated by race as any city in South
Africa during apartheid," says John Seigenthaler, 82, then the weekend
city editor of The Tennessean, Nashville's leading newspaper.

He later was editor and publisher of The
Tennessean, and was the first editorial director of USA TODAY.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., was among a group of young
people who aimed to change the status quo. In early 1960, he was a
19-year-old college student.

"You had all these young people from all over the
country, from all over the world," Lewis says. "They would come to Fisk to
watch films and plays, or come to the Fisk Chapel to listen to
unbelievable music. But they could not eat together downtown in racially
mixed groups."

For almost two years leading up to 1960, Lewis was in
a group of students learning non-violent tactics from James Lawson, a
graduate student at Vanderbilt
University.

The group included Diane Nash, an English major from
Chicago who would emerge as a key spokeswoman; Bernard LaFayette, later a
college president; C.T. Vivian, who later became an Atlanta city
councilman, and Marion
Barry, later mayor of Washington, D.C.

They held mock sit-ins, learning not to respond if
attacked.

In late 1959, they held test sit-ins without incident
at two Nashville department stores, Harvey's and Cain-Sloan, where they
were denied service.

Soon, they would be ready for the real protest.

Action in Greensboro

Before the Nashville students could act, they were
upstaged.

On Feb. 1, 1960 four young black students, all
freshmen at North Carolina A&T College, sat down at the whites-only
lunch counter of the Woolworth
department store in downtown Greensboro.

Unlike the Nashville students, Joseph McNeil, Ezell
Blair Jr., David Richmond and Franklin McCain had not spent long months
preparing. They simply had had enough, and decided to act.

"My parents grew up and carried the scars of racial
segregation," says McNeil, 67 and a retired Air Force Reserve major
general who lives in Hempstead, N.Y.

"I didn't want to see my children have to face the
same problem. We just felt that this certainly was a time to act. If not
now, when? If not my generation, what generation?"

Taylor
Branch, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights history,
Parting the Waters, says that word of the Greensboro sit-in "spread
like wildfire from campus to campus and from state to state."

Within days, sit-ins were happening all over the
South.

Black Southerners,
expecting profound change after the Supreme Court ordered school
desegregation in 1954, had grown frustrated with the slow pace of
progress, Branch says.

Sit-ins had been tried in more than a dozen cities
starting in 1958 in Wichita, but none ignited passions like the one in
Greensboro.

By the end of February, sit-ins had taken place in 31
cities and in 71 by March, according to Branch.

By October, sit-ins had occurred in 112 Southern
cities, according to Juan
Williams' Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years,
1954-1965.

Many of the sit-ins, however, were largely
ineffectual. Not so in Nashville.

On Feb. 13, 1960, 124 of the Nashville students —
dressed in their Sunday best — quietly marched two abreast from a nearby
church to Fifth Avenue.

They went to Woolworth, S.H. Kress and McClellan.
They made small purchases, then sat down at the lunch counters and asked
to be served, Lewis wrote in his memoirs, Walking With the
Wind.

"We don't serve (expletive) here," a waitress told
him at Woolworth, he says.

They waited, as other shoppers stared. The students
sat for a few hours, then left. They returned again and again over the
next two weeks, adding a fourth store, Grants, then a fifth, Walgreens.

Their numbers grew with each subsequent sit-in.

Angry white youths heckled, beat and spat on them. By
Feb. 27, the city had decided to crack down. Nashville police arrested 81
students.

"For the white community, there was shock, anger,
overwhelmingly negative feelings," Seigenthaler says. "The business
community adopted a very steel-backed approach, rigid and very
negative."

Many black parents feared for their children's future
— and their lives.

"There was an ongoing debate between the students and
their parents," LaFayette says. "They feared for our safety, because we
were going up against a system that was not known to be very sympathetic
or humane, particularly law enforcement in the South."

The sit-ins, however, rolled on into April. They were
costing the downtown merchants money, a situation that Nashville's
relatively large black middle class intensified with a boycott as Easter
approached.

"It was a 'No New Clothes Easter,' " Mitchell says.
"People were very serious about this. They didn't shop. Anyone who had new
clothes that Easter stood out."

The boycott's success prompted Mayor Ben West to
offer a compromise the students found insulting: a three-month trial
period during which blacks would be served in a separate area of the
restaurants.

It was rejected, and the sit-ins continued.

The turning point came on April 19, when the home of
the students' attorney, Z. Alexander Looby, was bombed. Later that day,
thousands of people, black and white, marched in silence to City Hall,
where Diane Nash confronted West.

She asked, "Mayor, do you recommend that the lunch
counters be desegregated?"

West hesitated briefly. "Yes," he answered, says
Seigenthaler, who was there.

On May 10, after weeks of behind-the-scenes
negotiations, six Fifth Avenue stores — Kress, Woolworth, McClellan,
Grant's, Walgreens and Cain-Sloan — served black customers at their lunch
counters for the first time.

Days after the West-Nash confrontation, King came to
Nashville and told a capacity crowd at the Fisk gym that the Nashville
sit-ins were "the best organized and the most disciplined in the
Southland," according to Parting the Waters.

The legacy

Soon after the West-Nash confrontation, Nashville
would exit the stage as the civil rights movement moved on to Birmingham,
Selma and Memphis, cities that would become better known because their
resistance to racial progress was stauncher and meaner.

"It's really tough to understand how a city could be
so insensitive, and in some ways, so dumb," Seigenthaler says. "But
Nashville's ability to resolve it within a relatively short period of time
and put it behind it was worth considering."

The intervening half-century has eroded the evidence
of what occurred on Fifth Avenue.

There is nothing here to remind visitors of the
sit-ins. The sign is still up at the old Kress store, but it's been
converted into loft apartments.

Walgreens, the only one of the stores that endures,
hasn't had a lunch counter in decades.

The young, multiracial staff has no recollection of
the sit-ins. They weren't even born then, and 1960 is not a topic of
conversation among customers.

Nashville residents, like those elsewhere, can sit
together and eat lunch wherever their wallets take them.

"Nashville today is a city that's very respected in
race relations," Mitchell says.

"It's a diverse, international community. The present
generation is often shocked when we refer to the sit-ins. They see a very
open and urban community, and they don't believe that that happened
here."

Posted

Updated

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