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By Root 1099 0

and one of them, Ezell Blair, Jr., asked for a cup of coffee. Refused service, they just sat there until the store closed. The technique had been tried out a number of times before by civil rights workers to test the reaction. But these four, without the backing of any organization, went much further. The next day they returned with twenty students at 10:30 in the morning and sat all day. A waitress, refusing service, explained to the press, “It’s a store regulation—a custom.” The students vowed to sit every day at the counter until they were served. Every day they jammed the Woolworth’s lunch counter with more and more students. Soon they were sitting in at other counters in Greensboro and then in other towns. Within two weeks of the first sit-in, national and international press were reporting on its broad significance. “The demonstrations were generally dismissed at first as another college fad of the ‘panty-raid’ variety,” reported The New York Times. “This opinion lost adherents, however, as the movement spread from North Carolina to Virginia, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee and involved fifteen cities.”

“Sit-ins took the existing civil rights organizations completely by surprise,” said Mary King, a white volunteer for SNCC. They amazed Martin Luther King’s newly established Southern Christian Leadership Conference and shocked the older organizations such as CORE. But the press was drawn to them and the public was impressed by them. SNCC was largely born out of the desire to invent stunning new approaches like this.

In 1959 there were twenty thousand students on the sprawling leafy campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There was little sign of the civil rights movement or any radical politics. But in February 1960, inspired by the sit-ins in Greensboro, Robert Alan Haber, a University of Michigan undergraduate, announced the formation of a new group called Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. To start up the new organization he recruited two people with roots in the traditional Left: Sharon Jeffrey, a sophomore whose mother was an important figure in the United Auto Workers union, and Bob Ross from the South Bronx, whose grandparents’ circle had been Russian revolutionaries and who loved jazz and beat poetry. They had also approached the studious, hardworking editor of the Michigan Daily, Tom Hayden. Hayden, who came from a small town not far from Ann Arbor, was consumed with his newspaper, a professional operation considered one of the best college papers in the country. He was more interested in another organization that began at the University of Michigan, a group that lobbied for the founding of a Peace Corps.

SDS wanted to recruit a network of student leaders across the country. Their timing was perfect. The February sit-ins in Greensboro had inspired American youth, made them long to be doing something, too. Hayden later wrote, “As thousands of Southern students were arrested and many beaten, my respect and identification with their courage and conviction deepened.” Haber, Jeffrey, and Ross began by joining picket lines in Ann Arbor in solidarity with the sit-ins in Greensboro. Hayden covered them for the Daily and wrote sympathetic editorials. In the spring, SDS invited black civil rights workers from the South to come to Ann Arbor and meet northern white students. Hayden covered the event, although he was by now the editor in chief of the paper, an ambition he had worked hard to fulfill.

Hayden, age twenty, had a transforming summer in California. He went to Berkeley, was handed a leaflet, asked for a place to stay, and found himself living with student activists. The Berkeley campus was well organized, and he wrote a series of long articles for the Daily about “the new student movement.” He went to the Livermore laboratories, where America’s nuclear arsenal had been developed. He interviewed nuclear scientist Edward Teller, who madly explained how nuclear war could be survived and how one was “better dead than Red.” At the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, he met Robert Kennedy,