Sit-Ins, Freedom Riders and James Meredith, 1960-62

Greensboro and the Sit-In Movement, 1960

On 1 February 1960, four Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College — Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond — sat down at the ‘whites only’ lunch counter of the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were refused service. They stayed in their seats until the store closed. The next day they returned with twenty more students. By the end of the week the protest had grown to several hundred, and within two months sit-ins had spread to fifty-five cities across thirteen states.

The Greensboro Four were not acting on impulse. They had read about Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns in India, watched the Montgomery Bus Boycott on television, and worked through how to behave under provocation. Sit-in students dressed neatly, brought textbooks to study at the counter, and were trained to absorb verbal abuse, lit cigarettes pushed into their hair and food poured over them without responding. Press photographs of well-dressed students sitting calmly while white teenagers screamed at them did the persuading.

Key Fact

The Greensboro sit-in began on 1 February 1960 with four Black students at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Within two months sit-ins had spread to 55 cities across 13 states — the fastest mass mobilisation the movement had yet seen.

Ella Baker and the Founding of SNCC

In April 1960 Ella Baker, a veteran NAACP and SCLC organiser, convened a conference of 200 student sit-in leaders at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Baker had spent decades organising for the NAACP and was suspicious of what she called the ‘messianic’ leadership style of Martin Luther King and the SCLC. She urged the students to set up their own independent organisation rather than become a youth wing of the SCLC. They followed her advice and founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced ‘snick’).

SNCC’s commitment to participatory, bottom-up leadership, with decisions taken collectively rather than by a single charismatic figure, shaped the movement throughout the 1960s. Where the SCLC ran set-piece campaigns around King, SNCC sent organisers to live in Black communities in the rural Deep South, registering voters and running freedom schools.

The Freedom Riders, 1961

In 1960 the Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia had extended desegregation to interstate bus terminals — waiting rooms, lunch counters and toilets used by passengers crossing state lines. Across the South the ruling was simply ignored. In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched the Freedom Riders to test it. Thirteen activists, seven Black and six white, set out from Washington DC on two buses bound for New Orleans. Black riders would use the white waiting rooms and white riders the Black ones, daring local police to arrest them in violation of federal law.

The first ten days were relatively quiet. Then on 14 May 1961 the buses reached Alabama. Outside Anniston, a Ku Klux Klan mob slashed the tyres of one bus, forced it to stop, and firebombed it. Photographs of the burning Greyhound, with its passengers staggering away through smoke, ran on front pages around the world. The other bus was attacked when it reached Birmingham; the local police commissioner Bull Connor had given the Klan fifteen minutes’ head start before sending officers. The Klan beat riders unconscious with iron bars at the bus station.

The original CORE riders were too injured to continue, but a second wave of SNCC volunteers from Nashville flew to Birmingham to take their place. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who had wanted the rides called off to avoid embarrassing his brother before a Vienna summit with Khrushchev, found himself forced to send 600 federal marshals to escort the buses through Alabama. When state troopers withdrew at the Mississippi border, riders were arrested in Jackson and sent to the notorious Parchman penitentiary. Over the summer of 1961 more than 300 Freedom Riders were arrested in Jackson alone. In November the Interstate Commerce Commission, under Kennedy administration pressure, finally enforced desegregation in interstate travel. The Freedom Riders had used violence inflicted on them — broadcast on television — to force federal action in a way the sit-ins alone had not.

James Meredith and Ole Miss, 1962

The third major confrontation of these years was over higher education. James Meredith, a 29-year-old Air Force veteran, applied to the University of Mississippi (‘Ole Miss’) in 1961. The university, citing Brown v. Topeka in reverse, refused on the obvious but unstated ground that he was Black. Meredith took the university to court. In September 1962 a federal court ordered Ole Miss to admit him. Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett went on television to declare he would never permit integration; he physically blocked Meredith from registering on three separate occasions.

On the night of 30 September 1962, after Meredith had been escorted onto campus by federal marshals, a mob of 2,500 white rioters attacked the marshals with bricks, bottles and gunfire. Two people were killed (a French journalist and a local jukebox repairman) and 300 injured. President Kennedy federalised the Mississippi National Guard and ordered in 30,000 US Army troops — the largest peacetime deployment of federal troops since Reconstruction. Meredith registered the next morning. He attended classes for a year under permanent armed escort and graduated in August 1963.

All three campaigns of 1960-62 used a Supreme Court ruling that the Southern states were ignoring (Brown 1954, Boynton 1960) and forced the federal government to enforce it. What was new was the move beyond Montgomery’s economic-pressure model to deliberate, planned confrontation. Activists chose the segregated lunch counter, the interstate bus, the segregated university, knowing each would generate violence and that television cameras would broadcast that violence into Northern living rooms. The strategy reframed civil rights from a Southern problem to a national one, and pulled the Kennedy administration — cautious about alienating Southern Democrats — into reluctant federal action.