Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas

1. The Origins of SNCC in Arkansas: Little Rock, Lupper, and the Law

1. The Origins of SNCC in Arkansas Little Rock, Lupper, and the Law JOHN A. KIRK On February 1, 1960, four African American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro—Ezell A. Blair, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Joseph McNeil—shopped for school supplies at their local F. W. Woolworth’s store. After making their purchases, McCain and McNeil went over to the lunch counter, took seats there, and asked for coffee and doughnuts. They were refused service on the grounds that the lunch counter was for whites only. Richmond and Blair joined them and engaged in a discussion with the waitress about the store’s policy of racial exclusion. The store manager tried to persuade them to leave. Eventually, when the store was about to close, they left.1 Over the following days and weeks, more students held “sit-ins” in Greensboro at an ever-expanding number of local establishments as the protests began to snowball. The sit-ins quickly began to spread to other towns and cities, first in North Carolina and then to other states. Within a year, over one hundred cities had experienced sit-ins with over fifty thousand participants and over three thousand arrests. Under pressure from the direct-action demonstrations and the African American community’s economic boycotts of businesses that often accompanied them, a number of businesses in Upper South states took the decision to voluntarily desegregate facilities rather than face continued disruption.2 More than fifty years later, the sit-ins have become part of American folklore as one of the most iconic forms of mass protest in the twentieth 3 century. In particular, sit-in centers such as Greensboro, the scene of the first 1960 sit-ins; Nashville, Tennessee, which produced a cohort of influential student leaders; and Atlanta, Georgia, which made headlines because of Martin Luther King Jr.’s involvement and arrest, have received extensive coverage.3 But as the historian Cynthia Griggs Fleming once noted, “each community’s response to the sit-ins was different [and] shaped by the particular conditions that existed in that community.” She concludes that “historians will never have a truly clear understanding of the sit-in movement of 1960 until each community has the chance to tell its own story.”4 A number of local studies have since appeared, providing insights into how the sit-ins impacted on a variety of different communities.5 Meanwhile, sociologists and legal scholars have examined the sit-ins from different disciplinary perspectives.6 While the historical literature has been strong on the local detail and historical context of the sit-ins, sociologists and legal scholars have tended to produce a much more comprehensive analysis of the overall trends of the sit-ins at regional and national levels. This essay seeks to combine the various insights of historical, sociological, and legal scholarship to demonstrate how these different perspectives can usefully complement one another. In doing so, this essay uncovers an important though neglected episode in the region-wide sit-in movement of 1960. The sit-in movement in Little Rock has been sidelined largely because of the earlier dramatic national civil rights headlines that were made in the city over school desegregation. After the United States Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) school desegregation ruling, Little Rock, viewed as a relatively moderate Upper South city, was among the first to announce plans for compliance . However, in September 1957, as the school desegregation plan was about to be implemented, Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus called out National Guard troops to prevent the entry of nine African American students into the city’s Central High School. Faubus’s actions eventually led to President Dwight D. Eisenhower sending federal troops to the city to ensure the safe passage of the nine African American students into the school. The Little Rock school crisis made international news headlines.7 One of the most recent and detailed accounts of the school crisis dismisses the subsequent sit-in movement in Little Rock in a two-sentence summary relegated to the book’s epilogue: “In March of 1960 a sit-in movement developed in downtown Little Rock, led by students at Philander Smith College. In response, a ‘secret committee’ of businessmen entered into negotiations with black leaders and quietly desegregated many of the city’s downtown business establishments.”8 In actuality, the story is 4 JOHN A. KIRK far...