Sit-ins 59At first, whites ignored the sit-ins, the traditional response to black
demands. Retaliation was not long in coming because, unlike federal court
decisions, sit-ins and boycotts hurt white businesses. Greensboro merchants
lost a third of their profits. Elsewhere, storekeepers unscrewed or roped off
lunch-counter seats, so that every customer had to stand. To nip the practice
of sit-ins in the bud, local officials across the South pressured black college
presidents to expel the protesters, and two hundred students and faculty
were removed. Expulsion proved to be an insufficient deterrent, so the police
charged 3,600 demonstrators with trespassing, disturbing the peace, or incit-
ing a riot. The police allowed thugs to pummel the protesters with bats and
torment them with cigarette smoke, scalding coffee, and ketchup. In Atlanta,
a demonstrator’s face was doused with acid. In Houston, three masked white
men kidnapped a demonstrator, beat him with a chain, carved ‘KKK’ on his
chest, and hung him upside-down from an oak tree. A firebomb destroyed a
gymnasium at a black college in Frankfort, Kentucky. In Biloxi, Mississippi,
a white mob shot ten blacks on a segregated beach.
Not all blacks welcomed this new student activism, especially older folks
who had long witnessed intimidation and violence when Jim Crow was chal-
lenged. Because the livelihood of many blacks depended on white good will,
the students’ brash demands for ‘freedom now’ invited dismissals, bombings,
and murders. NAACP chief legal counsel Thurgood Marshall believed that
the students had embarked on a foolish and costly plan to go to jail to break
the back of segregation. He vowed not to represent ‘a bunch of crazy colored
students who violated the sacred property’ of whites. This very caution alien-
ated black youngsters. When Cleveland Sellers organized a sit-in in his
hometown, his father chided him: ‘This demonstrating and rallying is no
good. If you keep on, you’re going to destroy everything.’ The younger
Sellers thought to himself, ‘Goddammit, nigger, you’re scared... of what
those candy-assed white crackers will do to you!’ Enthusiastic black students
led the way in this new facet of the civil rights movement because they were
less constrained by family or career concerns.
After the heady first weeks of the sit-in movement, the Highlander Folk
School held its annual workshop for college students. The theme in March
1960 was ‘The New Generation Fights for Equality,’ which reflected the
generational shift in the civil rights movement to young blacks and whites.
In the Smokey Mountains retreat, folk troubadours Guy Carawan and Pete
Seeger introduced the students to ‘freedom songs’ adapted from slavery and
the labor movement. ‘We Shall Overcome,’ which was based on a spiritual
(‘No More Auction Block for Me’) and Charles Tindley’s 1900 gospel song
(‘I’ll Overcome Some Day’), became the movement’s anthem [Doc. 6, p. 143].
With hands held and bodies swaying, the idealistic singers avowed that ‘deep
in my heart I do believe, we shall overcome some day.’ The training was so
‘We Shall Overcome’: The
philosophy and anthem
of the civil rights move-
ment.