Sit-Ins In The Civil Rights Movement

The beginning of the sit-ins were hard, but they overcame many hardships to achieve their goal. Most of their sit-ins they suffered from being attacked by white customers. They got beat up and never said a word and just dealt with it. After having their sit-ins they motivated others to do the same

With school boards avoiding integration once again, Greensboro civil rights activists were becoming anxious to desegregate public facilities in order to be successful unlike public schools. Dr. George Simkins pushed for the desegregation of all public facilities in Greensboro, and he even succeeded in doing so for golf courses. Four black students were inspired and tired of the racial inequality they had grown up in, so they arranged a non-violent protest by simply sitting in Woolworth’s Diner and demanding service. The protest tactic grew in numbers as more students, both male and female, endorsed the movement. In response, young white males began participating by verbally and physically assaulting some of the demonstrators, and government officials wanted store managers to arrange for the arrest of protestors before the situation got too unruly. Blacks boycotted the purchase of goods until they were served like their white counterparts, but the protests scared away the white consumers causing the stores and diners’ sales to drop. Diners and department stores worked in accordance to agree on a procedure to desegregate lunch counters. Select department stores refused to desegregate entire facilities, and most people believed that they did not have to because they had already compromised. Certain businesses did not want to segregate and

It started when the four college students made the decision out of frustration to sit at the counter that only served white people at a Woolworth’s store. According to Engelbert (1999), “The four young men believed it was time to expedite the desegregation process;” and hence, conceived their idea to conduct a sit-in at Woolworth’s and not leave until they were served (p. 56). I believe McNeil, Blair, McCain, and Richmond were consumed with a plethora of emotions. For example, terror must have

On February 7th, 1960, a week after the Greensboro sit-ins, The Nashville Student Movement had begun their first real sit-in. The objective of these sit-ins was to desegregate lunch counters in downtown Nashville. Book 1 goes into detail about the preparation for these sit-ins. Months before this

In the first presentation, I noticed an event called the Greensboro Sit-ins. This was a single event that sparked a nationwide movement and flood of support for the civil rights movement and the issue of business owners withholding service from those who were not white. On February 1st, 1960, 4 students of the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at a whites-only lunch table, requested service, and were then denied and asked to leave. When they left, they went to tell campus leaders what had happened and as a result gained people that wanted to participate in the sit-in. It is said that “the next morning twenty-nine neatly dressed male and female [NCATSU] students sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter,” the same counter where those first four students sat (NorthCarolinaHistory.org). After this happened, protests occurred each week and hundreds of students were showing up at Woolworth’s. Following this, more and more students from around the US were staging sit ins at segregated lunch counters as a form of non-violent protest against discrimination.

February 1st, 1960; the Greensboro Sit Ins; Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond. “Segregated conditions were as characteristic of Greensboro, however, as they were of cities with reputations for racial violence and intimidation.” The Greensboro Sit Ins made a huge impact not only in North Carolina, but along the Southeast states; thirteen states and fifty five different cities. This was where a group of four black male freshmen college students at A&T State University who

“Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud" (Empowering the Black Power Movement), The Sit-In movement was more effective than the Black Power movement because throughout the long course to rid the country of segregation had been widely affected by the peaceful protests. But, seeing the effects of the long path to "integration" which subsided to ongoing violent protests. Even though their main goal as a whole was integration they both took two different paths to see what would’ve been a better way to their main purpose of the movements. In the end, it took a lot to get where they are at now in society.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),[1] was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896

The Greensbro sit-ins first started on February 1st, 1960. Four black college freshman in Greensbro, North Carolina, visited a white-only Woolsworth's lunch counter where they demanded service. The black waitress refused to serve them, remarking that "fellows like you make our race look bad,". Regardless of this, the four men stayed seated. They returned the next day with nineteen classmates, and the day after that with eighty-five. By the end of the week there were over one-thousand black students attending the sit-in. The Sit-in movement began to spread throughout the South, though this time not just at lunch counters. The transportation industry, restaurants, and even voter registration were all recipients of this movement. The goal was

Sit-ins were very important in the 1960’s they were against segregated businesses and lunch counters.

Another significant transformation took place in the Civil Rights Movement in terms of its strategies. In analyzing this facet of the movement, we notice a great shift from nonviolent demonstration to forward, forceful action. Specifically, at the start of the Civil Rights Movement, lunch counter sit-ins were evident throughout the nation, as were Freedom Riders. Starting in Greensboro, North Carolina at a luncheonette called Woolworths, young black citizens would seat

Nashville Tennessee was one key city which saw the popularity of “sit ins.” These sit ins were peaceful boycotts of restaurants and businesses which refused to serve them. The Tennessee Tribune (2010) published an article discussing the beginnings of the sit ins within their state. They describe the beginning sit in thusly, “The first large-scale organized sit-in was on Saturday, February 13, 1960. At about 12:30 pm, 124 students, most of them black, walked into die downtown Woolworths, S. H. Kress, and McClellan stores and asked to be served at the lunch counters.

The Greensboro Sit-ins were a protest that young African Americans an some whites joined in, across the southern states. This occurred at Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina on February first 1960. There were four main people who started this protest, they were Ezell Blair, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil. There were many events that led up to this protest. One being the non-violent protest techniques practiced by Mohandas Gandhi.

Despite being freed after the Civil War, African-Americans were still denied many civil rights. Segregation laws first appeared in the 1830s, when Massachusetts railroad companies separated black and white passengers. In the South, black Americans saw many of their freedoms disappear in the 1870s with statutes called Jim Crow laws. In essence, these laws were a system of legal segregation. African-Americans and white citizens used separate facilities “ranging from drinking fountains to public schools” (Cayton et al). In 1943 the Congress of Racial Equality created the sit-in as a means of protest to desegregate the Jack Spratt Coffee House in Chicago. These sit-ins involved the protesters sitting peacefully at the counter waiting for service. Although there was several of these peaceful protests, one in particular proud to be a turning point for the Civil Rights movements. On February 4, 1960, four black college students walked into a Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina and refused to leave until closing time. Because of their civil disobedience, more protests followed which led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Civil disobedience was key in the pursuit of equality for African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Through forms of peaceful protest, African Americans were able to bring to light the socio-economic inequalities they faced and forced the government and general public to do something about it. Sit-ins, one method of practicing civil disobedience, took root in the early 1960s and quickly became a popular and effective form of peaceful protest. James Baldwin makes a very brief note of sit-ins in his essay “Down at the Cross”. Its brief mention is probably due to the time at which the essay was written, just before sit-ins became a national phenomenon. At first glance, one may think that Baldwin doesn‘t think