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By Root 416 0

to gain prominence and the support of liberal whites north and south. Soon it began to challenge the power of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the traditional black leadership organization, which had been instrumental in the passing of the historic Brown decisions in 1954. SCLC advanced the movement, but most important, SCLC began to train student activists on black college campuses in the South who provided the next wave of protest. This wave did not start at the kitchen tables or the black restaurants where King and his followers had planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Rather, it started at the lunch counter of a five-and-dime store, where the menu ran to hamburgers and grilled cheese or chicken salad sandwiches.

This phase of the fight for equality began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, freshmen from North Carolina’s Agricultural and Technical College (A&T), sat down at a Wool-worth’s lunch counter at four thirty in the afternoon, requested service, and launched the sit-in movement that would become the tocsin tolling the death knell of the segregated South. The rules of social behavior in the segregated South were complex. Blacks were able to shop in the store and indeed had worked behind the lunch counter serving food; however, they were not able to sit down to eat at the establishment. That was about to change that afternoon when the four young men took their places and simply waited for service while doing their schoolwork. They were not served, although they waited until the shop’s closing. The next day, others joined them: students from Bennett College, a black all-girls’ school in Greensboro, as well as some whites from the University of North Carolina’s Women’s College. Although the four had begun their campaign without a mandate from any of the larger Civil Rights or community organizations, their protest quickly galvanized the area, and by the fifth day, there were hundreds of students crowded into the downtown shops, peacefully demanding their rights. The sit-ins galvanized the country, demonstrations were staged in more than one hundred cities in the South and the North, and the lunch counter rapidly became a national symbol of the South’s inequalities.

The images of the well-dressed college students quietly sitting and the humiliations that they suffered as they remained impassive and dignified transformed the country, and the campaign soon spread nationwide. Blacks and whites in the North and West picketed large chains that had segregated facilities in the South, while in the South sit-ins spread rapidly to Nashville and Atlanta, where the campaign was broadened to include the desegregation of all public facilities as well as equal access to education and employment. The Greensboro protests ultimately resulted in the desegregation of that city’s lunch counters. In Nashville, major restaurants desegregated by May 1960, and the Atlanta protests resulted in the capitulation of the local business and political community in September 1961.

Although many of the leaders of the developing protest movement had been trained in passive resistance by traditional organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC, some younger activists feared that the momentum of the movement would fade. They called for continued nonviolent action but also acknowledged that more militancy might be required. A conference was called from April 15 to 17, 1960, to keep the protests moving forward. Addressing delegates who came from thirteen states and more than fifty different high schools and colleges, Ella Baker, a Shaw University student and an SCLC organizer, reminded them that it was about “more than a Hamburger”—an aptly culinary image for a movement that began with four young college students deciding to sit in for their lunch and their rights. The culture-changing protest was not about the mainstream food that was served at the lunch counters: the sixty-five-cent roast turkey, fifty-cent ham and cheese sandwich,