This Month in History Lunch Counter Sit ins
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022, 9:06 a.m.Shaw/Watha T. Daniel Library
This Month in History Lunch Counter Sit ins
This month in history, the Greensboro Lunch counter sit-ins began. The first sit-in was done in Baltimore, Maryland in 1955 but the one that got a lot of attention and really started the movement was done in Greensboro, North Carolina on Feb. 1, 1960.
A sit-in is where African Americans would sit in a white-only restaurant or lunch counter and refuse to move no matter what. The students were committed to act in a non-violent manner no matter how badly they were treated. Sit-ins were done to make it ok for black and whites to use white-only lunch counters and restaurants. Sit-ins were done by mainly black university students and were used both to desegregated the areas and to draw attention to the civil rights movement. While not the first sit-in done by African American students these were the first to gain national attention and turned into a national movement.
If you want to know more about the Lunch Counter Sit-In and the Civil Right Movement Check out these items:
A sit-in is where African Americans would sit in a white-only restaurant or lunch counter and refuse to move no matter what. The students were committed to act in a non-violent manner no matter how badly they were treated. Sit-ins were done to make it ok for black and whites to use white-only lunch counters and restaurants. Sit-ins were done by mainly black university students and were used both to desegregated the areas and to draw attention to the civil rights movement. While not the first sit-in done by African American students these were the first to gain national attention and turned into a national movement.
If you want to know more about the Lunch Counter Sit-In and the Civil Right Movement Check out these items:
- From Sit-ins to SNCC: The student civil rights movement in the 1960s, edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies
- Howard Zinn's Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil rights, and Black Women's Student Activism, Robert Cohen; foreword by Alice Walker.
- The Sit-in Movement of 1960, Martin Oppenheimer; preface by David J. Garrow.