Sit-Ins And Boycotts
Variety Stores & Bus Depots
Economic Pressure on variety Stores rose as Black youth and adults held sit-ins and Boycotts. stores responded by denying Dining services to black or both black and white customers. To avoid Serving Black Customers Stores Stacked goods on counters, or removed counter seats, or turned off lights and refused service, or roped off counters. Photo by Cecil J. Williams, Courtesy of Cecil J. Williams.
S.H. Kress & Co., Orangeburg, SC
“Before noon on Thursday, February 25, about 45 Claflin [University] and South Carolina State [College] students left their campuses in small groups of three and four, taking different routes but all headed to Kress. The students hoped to escape the notice of campus police, who would warn the police downtown. About fifteen students walked into Kress and sat on lunch counter stools. After the first group sat for fifteen minutes, employees posted signs saying the counter was closed. The initial wave of students left, and another group of twenty students took their seats. White customers doused them with mustard and ketchup. Some of the white people assembling carried weapons, such as large knives, that they brandished. A woman walked behind those sitting, tapping a baseball bat against the floor.”
Most “five-and-dime” stores offered a lunch counter, where coffee, soft drinks, breakfast, and lunch were served. In Southern stores, black customers could purchase goods, sometimes even food, but could not sit at the counters to eat. When South Carolina students attempted sit-ins, police ordered them to leave when they sat and arrested them for trespassing or breach of peace if they did not immediately leave the store. Some stores, like this Kress in Orangeburg, South Carolina, temporarily removed counter seats, stacked goods atop counters, or roped off dining areas.
These nationally owned variety stores only practiced segregation in the South and continued to defend doing so after sit-ins spread from North Carolina into Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama in February and March 1960. During W. T. Grant’s April stockholder meeting, this white Southern “pattern of life” received continued affirmation. President Louis C. Lustenberger said local custom governed the existence and continuance of variety stores’ segregated lunch counters. “Those are customs we can’t change.” During F. W. Woolworth Company’s annual stockholders’ meeting in May 1960, President Robert C. Kirkwood said the stores would continue to adhere to “local customs, established by local people for the conduct of business in their community,” given the “deep-rooted convictions of the people in the South.”
However, that May black and white leaders in Nashville, Tennessee negotiated desegregation of downtown stores. In July, merchants agreed to desegregate lunch counters in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina. By August, merchants in 27 more Southern cities had agreed to desegregate their stores’ lunch counters. The Southern Regional Council reported that not one city recorded violence or loss of business afterward.
Greyhound Bus Depot, Columbia, SC
Protesting Students take seats in the whites-only waiting room of the Greyhound Bus Depot. photo by Vic Tutte, Courtesy of The State Newspaper Photograph Archive of Richland Library, Columbia, SC.
On March 2, 1960, about 200 students from Allen University and Benedict College marched more than a mile, from Harden Street to Main Street in downtown Columbia, to protest segregation. They entered and exited stores and attempted sit-ins at Woolworth and Kress. At Woolworth, the manager closed the seating sections; at Kress, the manager roped off seats not occupied by white patrons. On March 3, about 300 students walked again to Main Street, visiting Woolworth, Kress, McCrory’s, H. L. Green, Walgreen, Eckerd, and Silver’s, as well as Tapp’s and Belk department stores. At the Greyhound Bus Depot, they sat quietly in the white waiting room. Both days, Columbia students were heckled but not attacked or arrested. Buses and bus terminals in the South were segregated, with black customers forced to sit in the back of buses or stand, if a bus were crowded, and to use segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, and restaurants in bus terminals.
“ The students had selected ten targets. They stayed on Main Street for about two hours, visiting Woolworth, Kress, McCrory’s, H. L. Green, Walgreen, Eckerd, and Silver’s, as well as Tapp’s and Belk department stores and the Greyhound Bus Depot, where they sat quietly, in their overcoats, on the wooden pews of the whites-only waiting room. Downtown businesses posted signs that said, ‘Carry Out Service Only’ and ‘No Trespassing.’ Tapp’s served only its employees in its roped-off dining area. At Woolworth ropes barricaded the lunch space, so students left after a few minutes. At Kress employees had removed counter seats. On the street a group of white men formed a line of their own and marched toward the demonstrators, yelling and laughing, but didn’t attack. This time two students managed to obtain service at McCrory’s. A young man, described in news reports afterward as a ‘light-skinned Negro,’ entered ahead of the students, sat at the counter, told the waitress he was in a hurry, and ordered tea and a hamburger. When served he passed the food along to ‘a darker companion.’ The manager closed the counter, turned off the lights, and closed the store for an hour.”
The “Colored Waiting Room” Sign is Visible on the Side Door, the required entrance for Black Customers. Courtesy of The State Newspaper Photograph Archive of Richland Library, Columbia, SC.
to Court To Enter the Front Door And Take a Seat
Change came slowly despite several successful challenges to segregation in interstate travel.
In 1944, Irene Morgan boarded a bus in Gloucester County, Virginia, intending to travel to Baltimore, Maryland, to join her husband and consult a doctor after a miscarriage. She was arrested when she refused to give her seat to a white passenger. Convicted for violating Virginia’s segregation laws, she refused to pay the fine; the NAACP pursued appeals. The US Supreme Court ruled, in 1946, that segregation on commercial buses engaged in interstate travel violated the US Constitution’s commerce clause. The Court didn’t say how or when to desegregate, and segregation continued.
Read Morgan v. Virginia, (328 U.S. 373 (1946).
In 1952, Sarah Keys headed home to Washington, North Carolina, from Trenton, New Jersey. The 22-year-old private in the Women’s Army Corps refused to move to the back of the bus when a new driver took charge in North Carolina. Police arrested Keys and kept her in jail overnight. She sued in Keys v. Carolina Coach Company. In 1955, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled segregation on interstate buses unlawful. But the Supreme Court and ICC decisions did not cover intrastate travel, and thirteen states continued to enforce segregation within their borders.
Hear Keys tell her story.
See a historic marker for Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 264 M.C.C. 769 (1955).
In 1954, a driver ordered Sara Mae Flemming off a Columbia, South Carolina, bus after Flemming accepted a seat offered by a white woman. The driver struck the 20-year-old housekeeper, knocking her off her feet as she tried to leave by the front exit. Her lawsuit, Flemming v. South Carolina Electric and Gas Company, traveled through district court three times, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals twice, and the US Supreme Court, which sent the case back. The final district-court jury, all-male and all-white, had no interest in her Fourteenth Amendment rights.
The 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott ended with the US Supreme Court’s affirmation of a district court ruling that Alabama’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court cited the Fourth Circuit’s statement in Flemming that “the separate but equal doctrine can no longer be followed as a correct statement of the law.”
See a photo of Flemming and read more about her.
Read Flemming v. South Carolina Electric and Gas Company, 128 F.Supp. 469 (E.D.S.C. 1955).
And Flemming v. South Carolina Electric and Gas Company, 224 F2d.752 (1955).
And Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (M.D. Ala. 1956).
In 1960, Howard Law School student Bruce Boynton was traveling from Washington, D.C. to Montgomery, Alabama. The 20-year-old student entered a bus terminal’s segregated restaurant in Richmond, Virginia, ordered a meal, refused to leave, and was arrested for trespassing. In Boynton v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public transportation violated the Interstate Commerce Act.
Read Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960).
Hear Boynton describe ordering and being refused a hamburger and tea.
It took the Freedom Rides before U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy required the ICC to act, in May 1961, and end segregation in trains and buses, their terminals and terminal facilities.