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Student Sit-In Demonstrations |
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One of the most visible forms of racial discrimination in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the refusal of snack bars, lunch counters, and restaurants to serve African Americans. On February 1, 1960, four black college students staged a "sit-in" at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Although the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)had been using sit-ins to publicly oppose racial segregation since the early 1940s, this particular sit-in, perhaps because it involved college students, received extensive coverage in the national news media, particularly on network television news.
All at once students at other black colleges throughout the South began staging sit-ins in an effort to end racial segregation in nearby eating places. Students at white colleges often joined these sit-in demonstrations, as did sympathetic high school students and adults of both races. Frequently these demonstrations resulted in white segregationists taunting and beating up the persons sitting-in, thereby producing even more coverage by the news media. By January of 1961, as Eisenhower was leaving office, over 70,000 black and white youngsters had participated in the sit-ins. A new civil rights organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was formed to organize sit-in demonstrations throughout the South.
It can be argued there is something of a connection between President Eisenhower's swift intervention in the Little Rock school crisis in 1957and the rise of the sit-in movement early in 1960. Eisenhower had made it clear that, in the end, the U.S. Government would support, militarily if necessary, those who were working for civil rights in the southern United States. Although the sit-in demonstrators were protesting local and state laws, Little Rock had given them much reason to believe that the U.S. Government would eventually come into the dispute on their side.
President Eisenhower's support for civil rights might have been considerably more positive and dramatic if the sit-in demonstrations had occurred early in his administration rather than at the very end. The civil rights issue so completely divided the American body politic that no president took action on meaningful civil rights legislation until a dramatic national event forced him to take action. Thus President Kennedy did not persuasively support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 until civil rights demonstrations and riots erupted in Birmingham, Alabama. President Johnson did not press for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 until the violent suppression of the voting rights march to Selma, Alabama. If the sit-in demonstrations had begun taking place earlier in the Eisenhower years, and Eisenhower had been presented with a serious situation involving equal access to public accommodations, there well could have been considerably more action by Eisenhower in the civil rights field.
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