African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology

13. The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958–1960

In 1960 black youths conducted a “sit-in” in Greensboro, North Carolina, to obtain the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter. Others quickly replicated sit-ins throughout the South and, just as quickly, the press labeled Greensboro the “lrst” sit-in. Historian David Levering Lewis, for instance, said: “There were not a few white southerners, and probably a majority of white northerners, who would have wished to say to the first sit-in students, as did the woman in the Greensboro Woolworth’s, ‘you should have done this ten years ago.’” Even data-oriented social scientists such as Doug McAdams portray the sit-ins as “beginning in early February of 1960.”1 Some studies of the naacp during the civil rights movement mention Oklahoma sit-ins but do not mention Wichita, Kansas, at all.2 And yet the lrst modern sit-in may have been in Wichita. These accounts are inaccurate and incomplete but they also symbolize the extent to which the civil rights movement in general has been written about almost exclusively from the perspective of what occurred in the South. Considering that journalists wrote the lrst accounts, it may have been their initial perspective that was responsible for the subsequent lapse by serious scholars. For example, in the throes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, Grover Hall, Jr., challenged The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958–1960 ronald walters chapter 13 The Great Plains Sit-In Movement 303 northern journalists to report on northern race friction. Hall wrote U.S. News and World Report describing how northern papers such as the Minneapolis Morning Tribune and the Chicago Daily News put the Montgomery story on the front page and news about their own race friction on the back pages. Obviously, to the northern editors, the most newsworthy incidents of race relations were occurring in the South, where challenges to age-old social practices, originating in the institution of slavery, were taking place.3 At lrst Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Lauren Soth, of the Des Moines Register, was typical of those who responded, saying that this southern focus was natural, since “the [race] problem simply did not exist” in the North.4 Nevertheless, his and a host of other papers subsequently carried stories about their own racial problems, but because the drama in the South was created by the danger of blacks challenging the existing racial order, the real story of civil rights was still covered as the southern story. One casualty of this perspective is that scholarship on many northern aspects of both the civil rights movement and the more aggressive black liberation movement have been neglected. As Howard Zinn was to suggest, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the movement for social change in the South moved slowly.5 The signilcance of the sit-in movement was that it electriled southern activists as a model for action throughout the South. Besides challenging segregation at lunch counters and restaurants, the movement quickly became elaborated into many other tactics of confrontation, such as “kneelins ” at churches, “wade-ins” at swimming pools, “stand-ins” at voter registration places, and others. In perhaps the major scholarly work on sit-in movements, sociologist Aldon Morris stated that despite the Greensboro sit-in’s mythic status as the “lrst,” others had occurred in at least lfteen cities between 1957 and February 1960.6 His study of the linkage between the Greensboro event and other such actions in the South, however, 304 walters conlrmed its quickening effect on the entire movement. He sought to analyze the sit-ins within the context of resource mobilization theory, which posited the importance of preexisting social supports within the black community, such as civil rights organizations and churches. Political scientist Doug McAdams’s data also indicates the important function of sit-ins and that student groups associated with the naacp, churches, or colleges initiated 75 percent of sit-ins or other direct-action tactics in the movement.7 Morris’s research also revealed that two of the earliest of the modern sit-ins occurred in Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, under the auspices of the naacp Youth Councils.8 In an early article, Morris, following the seminal work of Martin Oppenheimer , repeated an error in stating that: “the lrst sit-in cluster occurred in Oklahoma in 1958 and spread to cities within a hundredmile radius.”9 Later...