Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia

5. To Sit or Not to Sit

In the early 1960s Ford Johnson was an undergraduate at Virginia Union University in Richmond. So was his sister, Elizabeth. On Saturday, February 20, 1960, they headed downtown to participate in sit-ins directed at the segregated seating arrangements of the eating venues in the department stores that lined Broad Street. The Civil Rights movement was alive and well in the Upper South. Racial segregation remained under siege, although in ways that differed from the 1940s and 1950s (see chapter 4). Whether the racial requirements imposed in those stores reflected the express mandates of state and city governments or the private decisions of various enterprises did not matter to the demonstrators. It didn’t really make any difference anyway, as demonstrators across the South found out in February and the months that followed. Even if integrated service itself was within the law, managers at lunch counters and other establishments cited trespass laws when they called upon public authorities to deal with demonstrators seeking desegregation. What animated the Johnsons and the dozens of other black students who participated with them in Richmond that Saturday was a commitment to bring segregation to an end—certainly, to begin with, at the downtown lunch counters. They relied on the law, they challenged the law, they were arrested by the law: they encountered the law at every turn as they sought to bring about racial change. The Civil Rights Movement in an Upper South Community Sit-ins against segregation did not originate in 1960. As early as 1939, one took place at the city library in Alexandria, Virginia (see chapter 4). Others occurred during World War II in Chicago by members of the 5 To Sit or Not to Sit Scenes in Richmond from the Civil Rights Movement Congress of Racial Equality and in Washington, D.C., by Howard University students. Young people in Oklahoma City engaged in sit-ins beginning in 1958.1 In 1960, however, the tactic became widespread. On Monday, February 1, 1960, four young men, students at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, staged a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. Between then and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sit-ins took place across the South. Some led to desegregation without arrests. Yet arrests were made in every former Confederate state and in Border South states, too, and dozens of cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.2 Most studies of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have focused on Deep South communities: Montgomery, Alabama, for example , with such individuals as Rosa Parks and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and such institutions and organizations as Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and the Montgomery Improvement Association. By contrast, this chapter highlights an Upper South community, Richmond, Virginia, from early 1960 through mid-1963. At issue were property rights, the relevance of such concepts as equal protection and state action, and—in Virginia—a state law requiring segregation in “public assemblages.”3 Opponents of change insisted that lunch counters, in particular, were private and therefore immune to the Fourteenth Amendment. Protest demonstrators and their lawyers drew upon the logic of Shelley v. Kraemer, a 1948 Supreme Court decision that banned judicial enforcement of private agreements that promoted racial segregation in housing. Planning the Richmond Sit-ins Virginia Union University is a small, private, black institution of higher education located several miles northwest of downtown Richmond. In 1960 it was the center of the Richmond sit-in movement. On February 6, the Saturday after the Greensboro sit-ins began, three friends met and discussed the recent events. Two of them, Frank Pinkston and Charles Sherrod, were graduate students at Union Theological Seminary. The other, Woodrow Grant, was a senior at Virginia Union. Grant later recalled that they “reflected” on the events in Greensboro and “the possibility of doing the same thing in Richmond.”4 In that meeting the three men discussed how to mobilize the campus and the wider community. They also planned a meeting to be held two days later, on Monday, February 8, on the Virginia Union campus. At the To Sit or Not to Sit 115 Monday meeting students readily agreed to the proposal that nonviolent direct action should govern their protest. The leaders reminded the group of a talk by Martin Luther King at Virginia Union the year before, and they...