The Civil Rights Movement Revised Edition

Sit-ins 61

Jackson, Jesse(1941– ):

Headed Operation

Breadbasket and PUSH

and sought the presi-

dency in the 1980s.

each wanted the students to become a youth wing, but the Atlanta-based
SNCC rejected such paternalism by these mainstream groups. After all, the
impatient students were ‘probably as much experts at this as anybody else,’
as Franklin McCain observed pointedly. Even so, it soon became obvious that
to make their mark the cash-strapped students needed the NAACP’s financial
aid and legal know-how.
The students pressured two hundred cities in twenty states to integrate
their lunch-counters and theaters. The Greensboro Woolworth’s caved in
after losing $200,000 – 20 per cent of its business. A black female employee

• not the Greensboro Four – ate the first meal, an egg-salad sandwich she
  made herself that morning. Although the entire Woolworth’s chain changed
  its racial policy by the end of 1961, desegregation proceeded unevenly. In
  Greensboro, most white businesses kept blacks out of restaurants, motels,
  and theaters, until North Carolina A & T student council president Jesse
  Jacksonled a thousand protesters in the spring of 1963.
  The sit-ins signaled a decisive shift in who would lead the struggle for
  racial justice. For a half-century, the NAACP and Urban League used lobby-
  ists and the law to end Jim Crow, but they were increasingly eclipsed by
  students impatient with the direction, speed, and scope of the civil rights
  movement. By transforming segregation from a legal to a moral issue com-
  pelling immediate action, the sit-ins attracted thousands of new activists,
  black and white, and spawned new movement leaders, notably John Lewis,
  Diane Nash, Julian Bond, Bob Moses, and Stokely Carmichael. They had tasted
  success and demanded the whole house of Jim Crow be destroyed. ‘Nothing
  can stop us now,’ one insisted optimistically. Moreover, the sit-ins greatly
  broadened the civil rights movement. Instead of an occasional demonstration
  orchestrated by prominent civil rights leaders, students organized protests
  throughout the South. As the movement gained ground, prominent enter-
  tainers Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dick Gregory, and Sidney Poitier
  joined the students. When Gregory was told by a lunch-counter waitress,
  ‘We don’t serve colored people here,’ the comedian quipped, ‘That’s all right,
  I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’
  A new round of sit-ins in Atlanta propelled civil rights into the presiden-
  tial election of 1960. The students singled out Rich’s, the city’s largest depart-
  ment store, where the King family and Ebenezer church members had
  shopped all their lives. Their slogan was: ‘Close out your charge account with
  segregation, open your account with freedom.’ On 19 October, King joined
  the sit-in, despite serious misgivings. It was the first time that a black leader
  of national stature courted arrest, and he would end up going to jail thirteen
  times. When the protesters refused bail and the Klan began marching, the
  mayor saw that charges were dropped against the students. King’s arrest was
  a different matter. He had violated his probation for not getting a Georgia

Belafonte, Harry

(1927– ): Calypso singer

and civil rights fund-raiser.