The Impact of Civil Rights Protests, 1960-74 » Sit-ins and Freedom Riders

Greensboro, 1960: the sit-ins begin

By 1960 the courts had ruled against segregated schools and buses, but daily life in the South had hardly changed. Shops such as Woolworth's took black customers' money at the tills, yet would not serve them at the lunch counter.

On 1 February 1960 four black students from a college in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the whites-only lunch counter in Woolworth's and asked for coffee. They were Ezell Blair Jr, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond. They were refused, and they stayed in their seats until the shop closed. The next day they came back with more than twenty others. By the fifth day about 300 students were taking part.

Key terms:

• Sit-in: a protest in which people sit in a place that is closed to them and refuse to leave until they are served or arrested.
• SNCC: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, set up in April 1960 and run by young people. It was often called 'Snick'.
• CORE: the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights group founded in Chicago in 1942.
• Freedom riders: black and white volunteers who rode buses together through the South in 1961 to test whether bus stations were still segregated.

How the sit-ins spread

Students elsewhere copied Greensboro at once. By the end of March 1960 there had been sit-ins in more than 50 cities across the South. By the end of the year about 70,000 people had taken part and more than 3,000 had been arrested.

The best organised campaign was in Nashville, Tennessee. Students there, including Diane Nash and John Lewis, had been trained in workshops run by James Lawson. They practised staying calm while people shouted at them and hit them. At the counters they dressed smartly, sat quietly and did not fight back when white youths attacked them. When the police arrested one group, another group took the empty seats. Many refused to pay bail or fines and stayed in jail instead. This tactic became known as 'jail, no bail'. It filled the jails and cost the city money.

The setting up of SNCC

The sit-ins had no single leader. Ella Baker, an experienced organiser for the SCLC, invited the student protesters to a meeting at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960. There they set up SNCC.

Baker urged the students to stay independent instead of becoming a youth branch of the SCLC, and they agreed. SNCC was different from the older groups in three ways:

• It was run by students, and it made decisions as a group instead of relying on one famous leader.
• It believed in non-violent protest that confronted segregation directly, not only in court cases.
• Its members were willing to live and work in the most dangerous parts of the Deep South.

The freedom riders, 1961

Remember, the Supreme Court had banned segregated seating on interstate buses (those going from one state to another) in 1946. Interstate travel came under federal law, not state law. In December 1960, in a case called Boynton v Virginia, it also banned segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants of bus stations used by interstate passengers. In the South both rulings were ignored.

James Farmer, the leader of CORE, planned to prove it. He expected violence, and he believed it would force the federal government to enforce the law.

• 4 May 1961: thirteen riders, seven black and six white, left Washington DC on two buses, heading for New Orleans.
• 14 May, Anniston, Alabama: a white mob that included Klansmen attacked the first bus and slashed its tyres. The bus got away, but the flat tyres forced it to stop a few miles outside the town. Someone threw a fire bomb through a window. The riders escaped from the burning bus and several were beaten. Nobody was killed. This was the Anniston fire bombing, and the photograph of the burning bus was printed around the world.
• 14 May, Birmingham, Alabama: the riders on the second bus were badly beaten at the bus station. The police did not arrive until the attack was over.
• 17 May: the CORE riders could not go on, so students from Nashville, organised by Diane Nash, took their place. She argued that if violence stopped the ride, violence would be used to stop every protest.
• 20 May, Montgomery, Alabama: another mob attacked the riders with clubs and pipes.
• 24 May, Jackson, Mississippi: the riders were arrested as soon as they used the whites-only waiting room. Over the summer more than 300 riders were jailed in Mississippi.

How the federal government responded

John F. Kennedy had been President only since January 1961. He needed the votes of Southern Democrats in Congress. He was also about to meet the Soviet leader, and pictures of burning buses made the USA look bad abroad. He wanted the rides to stop. His brother Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General, the head of the Justice Department. He asked for a 'cooling-off period'. The riders refused.

The freedom rides showed that non-violent protest could push a reluctant federal government into action. They also showed the limits of that help. The Kennedys acted to end a crisis, and they let Mississippi jail the riders.

Exam-style question

Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)

The students who filled the lunch counters of Nashville in 1960 were no unruly mob. They came in their smartest clothes, carrying their textbooks, and sat in silence while white youths jeered at them and knocked them from their stools. Not one of them struck back. They had rehearsed for these insults in careful workshops, and when the police dragged one row away, a fresh row calmly took its place. Their patience put the city's leaders to shame.

What impression does the author give about the students who took part in the sit-ins? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]