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Chapter Five “More Than a Hamburger and a Cup of Coffee”: NAACP Youth and the 1960s Black Freedom Struggle February 1, 2010, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1960 sit-in movement. The sit-in movement was initiated when four students from North Carolina A&T State University staged a sit-in on February 1, 1960, at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. As a result of this demonstration , sit-ins spread across the South. These sit-in demonstrations facilitated the desegregation of public facilities and businesses; youth from across the United States, particularly southern black youth, initiated one of the largest protest movements of that decade. Although historians have written extensively about the role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality in 1960s student demonstrations, little research has attended to the activities of NAACP youth councils and college chapters and their role as early initiators and participants in the student demonstrations . This chapter examines the role of the NAACP youth councils and college chapters in the sit-in demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s, and their efforts to end racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South. Motivated by the legal victory of Brown v. Board of Education and the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott during the late 1950s, NAACP youth chapters staged demonstrations that led to the desegregation of major department store chains and other local businesses. Unlike the national press coverage that the 1960s sit-ins received, many of the student protests during the late 1950s had not been covered by national and/or local press.1 Certainly, this dearth of attention accounts for the lack of recognition in historical writings concerning these demonstrations. In 1956, the Louisville, Kentucky, Youth Council protested the discriminatory practices with sit-ins at the F. W. Woolworth and Kress department stores, which led to the desegregation of lunchrooms at those businesses.2 Two years later, in July 1958, the Wichita, Kansas, Youth Council conducted a sit-in demonstration at Dockum Drug Store. Ronald Walters, the twenty-eight-year-old council president and organizer of the protest, remembered , “We were motivated by the actions of other people in the struggle, especially by the pictures of people in Little Rock and King’s Montgomery bus boycott.”3 Moved into action by both the civil rights efforts of other black “More Than a Hamburger and a Cup of Coffee” 96 activists and the grim reality of second-class citizenship that oppressed black people in Wichita, Walters maintained, Social and economic progress in those years were [sic] exceedingly difficult for Wichita’s small, closely knit black community, a product of turn-of-the-century migration. We faced an implacably cold, dominant white culture. Blacks in the ’50s attended segregated schools up to high school and were excluded from mixing with whites at movie theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, and other places of public accommodation. . . . Even though the signs “black” and “white” were not publicly visible as in the South, we lived in separate worlds, just as blacks and whites did in Southern states.4 Determined to eradicate the barriers that relegated blacks to second-class citizenship , Walters commenced the drugstore sit-in on Saturday, July 19, 1958. Although they were refused service, the young people were not deterred. As the sit-in demonstrations gained momentum, Wichita youth council members occupied the lunch counters for longer periods. On August 2, 1958, Walters and youth council members occupied vacant seats at the lunch counters of Dockum from 12:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., closing time. Again, the young people departed without incident. On August 7, the youth resumed the sit-in demonstration. In a counter-protest, a group of whites entered the store and attempted to start a fight with the demonstrators, spitting on them and hurling racial slurs. The police were called, and the white youth dispersed. As momentum grew, the protest demonstration became popular among young people, and several white students from Wichita State University became involved.5 On Sunday, August 10, the Wichita branch held a mass meeting, and the youth informed the community of its efforts to desegregate Dockum Drug Store. After sustaining great financial loss from the demonstrations, Dockum decided to integrate. Walters remarked, “On a Saturday afternoon, into the fourth week of the protest, a man in his 30s came into the store, stopped, looked back at the manager in the rear, and said, ‘Serve them. I’m losing too much money.’ This was...

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