The Civil Rights Movement Revised Edition

Sit-ins 55

McKissick, Floyd(1922–

91): CORE attorney who

organized North Carolina

sit-ins and later preached

black power.

Sellers, Cleveland

(1944– ): SNCC program

director and black power

advocate.

and gratified at gaining his ‘manhood.’ The Greensboro Four thus launched
the student phase of the civil rights movement. Like Rosa Parks, the students
remained in their seats to claim full citizenship.
Word of the Greensboro Four’s sit-in traveled quickly, especially after a
local radio station broadcast the story. Brimming with the confidence of a
‘Mack truck,’ thirty-one young black men and women returned the next day
to Woolworth’s. On the third day, students filled almost all sixty-six seats and
did their homework, wrote letters, or read the Bible. By Saturday, hundreds
of black students from A & T, the all-women’s Bennett College, and Dudley
High School, plus whites from three area colleges jammed Woolworth’s and
Kress’s five-and-dime stores. Others filled drugstores, shopping centres, and
drive-ins. Eventually, 90 per cent of A & T students participated in the sit-
ins, which thrilled one woman: ‘We older people didn’t have the guts to do
it, but the young people didn’t care even if they died.’
Although twenty sit-ins had taken place in southern cities in the late
1950s, the Greensboro sit-in ignited the largest of all black protests. The civil
rights movement had been in a lull since Little Rock, and the sit-ins provided
a much-needed tonic. According to historian William Chafe, the Greensboro
‘coffee party’ was a ‘watershed’ in American history, a ‘volcanic’ event com-
parable to the Boston Tea Party before the Revolution.
A & T students told their dramatic story to family, friends, and fraternity
members. Within a week of the Greensboro sit-ins, like demonstrations
appeared in other North Carolina cities, including Raleigh, Durham, High
Point, and Winston-Salem. Black colleges and churches combined with the
NAACP, SCLC, and CORE to coordinate the students who demanded an end
to Jim Crow. Under the direction of Floyd McKissick– the first black admit-
ted to the University of North Carolina law school – a sit-in headquarters
provided eager students with training and legal assistance and then trans-
ported them to other sit-in sites. When SCLC executive director Ella Baker
heard of the sit-ins, she challenged students at other southern colleges to act.
White university students at Michigan, Swarthmore, Berkeley, and Harvard
picketed Woolworth stores to express their support. The sit-in movement
had unexpectedly caught on fire.
Again, television was instrumental in helping the civil rights movement.
Images of the sit-ins transfixed young blacks who regarded Brownas a failure
and showed them the new tool to dismantle Jim Crow. The sit-ins gave
Cleveland Sellers Jr., a teenager in Denmark, South Carolina, ‘a shot of
adrenalin’ when he saw students ‘beaten and dragged through the streets
by their hair.’ The televised student revolt inspired Robert Parris Moses,
a young Harlem high school mathematics teacher, to join the southern
crusade. He discerned a new militant attitude in the Greensboro activists,
one that was no longer ‘cringing’ but ‘sullen, angry, determined.’ ‘They were

Moses, Robert(1935– ):

Low-key organizer of

SNCC’s Freedom Summer

project.