Civil Rights Movement

The August 28, 1963, March on Washington, the last prominent peaceful demonstration of the civil rights movement, was timed to coincide with an expected congressional filibuster on President John Kennedy's Civil Rights Bill.

Angered by abusive bus drivers, leaders of the Montgomery, Alabama, African American community resolved to challenge the practice of reserving seats at the front of the bus for whites and, if additional whites boarded, forcing blacks to surrender their seats.

In 1958, following the formation of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) by the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith Sr. and others, African American leaders and students launched an attack on Jim Crow segregation.

The sit-ins of the 1950s and 1960s reached many cities and towns, including Lexington, Kentucky. It was the local and national press that carried the story of the sit-ins to the public and helped to preserve such activities in the annals of African American history.

On February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond, all students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College (now University), entered F.W. Woolworth's, purchased goods, and proceeded to the whites-only lunch counter and requested service.

Although the Greensboro, North Carolina, Sit-in captured national attention in February 1960, it was preceded by the action of seven young African American Durhamites, who three years earlier entered the Royal Ice Cream parlor, sat in the whites-only section, and requested service.

Shortly after the Greensboro sit-ins began on February 1, 1960, High Point and neighboring cities in North Carolina and other states launched similar efforts.

Civil rights actions in Portsmouth, Virginia, during 1960 were not well organized at the beginning, being unplanned and spontaneous student efforts in sympathy with the Greensboro sit-ins.