From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s

1. The New Movement: The Student Sit-Ins in 1960

1 1 The New Movement The Student Sit-Ins in 1960 Iwan Morgan On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, four African American students, all age seventeen or eighteen, from the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (NCA&T) conducted a sit-in at the Woolworth store on Elm Street in downtown Greensboro to challenge its whites-only lunch-counter policy. Before the week was out, more than three hundred students would join them in sitting in at downtown lunch counters. The actions of Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond generated a new wave of student protest by African Americans and their white sympathizers that would be of critical importance for the achievement of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. The city that played unwilling host to this momentous episode had a relatively progressive reputation on racial issues and wanted to be seen as the prosperous gateway to the emerging Sunbelt South, but its place in history became irrevocably linked instead to the black freedom struggle. As journalist-scholar Taylor Branch commented, “Greensboro helped define the new decade.” In like fashion, historian William Chafe observed, “Greensboro was the pivot that turned the history of America around.”1 The wave of sit-ins that followed Greensboro and the failure of local white power structures to suppress them enhanced the self-confidence of student activists. Reflecting this, a meeting held on April 16–18, 1960, at Shaw University, an all-black college in Raleigh, North Carolina, agreed to form a new interracial organization to promote and support peaceful direct action against segregation. As historian Clayborne Carson observed, “SNCC’s founding was an important step in the transformation of a limited student movement to desegregate lunch counters into a broad and sustained movement to achieve major social reforms.”2 2 · Iwan Morgan Initially, the new organization exercised little control over the protests that it was meant to coordinate, but it started to play a more assertive role as 1960 drew to a close. Its various changes of name reflected this evolution. Originally called the Temporary Coordinating Committee, it was renamed the Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1960. At its Atlanta conference in October, the organization dropped “Temporary” from its title to become the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in recognition that the struggle to overthrow racial inequalities would be long and difficult.3 The formation of SNCC, howsoever called, confirmed the emergence of a fresh element in the struggle for African American civil rights in the South. It was significant that after Greensboro, sit-in participants habitually spoke of being involved in a movement. In a report for the Southern Regional Council, an interracial group of civil rights moderates, Leslie Dunbar pinpointed this as a break from the past: “No-one ever speaks of the ‘school desegregation movement.’ One accomplishment of the sitin , then, was to achieve, almost from the start, this recognition.”4 The new movement would play a major role alongside more longstanding organizational actors in bringing about the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Each of these contributed in its own way to the freedom struggle in the South. Nevertheless, the sit-ins and the formation of SNCC were crucial in galvanizing the other civil rights groups that had shown signs of losing momentum after the highs of the Brown v. Topeka judgments of 1954–55 and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–56. As historian Robert Cook observes, the student demonstrations “kickstarted the civil rights movement into action by revealing the extent of grass-roots dissatisfaction with segregation and providing the existing protest with a mass constituency in the South.”5 To set the context for the essays that follow, some explanation of the emergence and initial development of student civil rights activism in 1960 is necessary. It is important when looking back on the demonstrations of that seminal year from the vantage of more than a half-century later to understand that they were neither inevitable nor predictable. The outbreak of civil rights protest by African American students and their white supporters took the entire country no less than the segregationist South wholly by surprise. Twenty-first-century familiarity with student protest as a political phenomenon derives from its frequent occurrence in many parts of the world since Greensboro. In the United States, student peace protest against the Vietnam War was an important factor in ultimately making The New Movement: The Student Sit-Ins in 1960 · 3 America’s involvement in...