A History of the Civil Rights Movement

SIT-IN S AND FREEDOM RIDES

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As news of the Greensboro protests spread, students organized sit-ins in other North Carolina cities and in other states. In some cases, African American students were joined by white students. Civil rights activist James Farmer later explained the importance of sit-ins: They symbolized a change in the mood of African American people. Up until then, we had accepted segregation—begrudgingly—but we had accepted it. . . . At long last after decades of acceptance, four freshman students at North Carolina A&T went into Woolworth and at the lunch counter they “sat-in.” When told they would not be served, they refused to leave and this sparked a move ment throughout the South. THE SIT-IN MOVEMENT In Nashville, Tennessee, 22-year-old Diane Nash was inspired by the Greensboro sit-in. Nash had grown up in Chicago, Illinois. Until she trans ferred from Howard University in Washington, D.C., to Fisk University in Nashville, she had not experienced the ugliness of segregation. She quick ly became an activist. With John Lewis, she organized the Nashville Student Movement (NSM), which worked for the civil rights of blacks. Nash and other NSM members had been planning to hold sit-in protests in Nashville. On February 13, 1960, she was one of 124 students who sat-in at lunch counters in downtown stores. She later explained: When the students in Greensboro sat in on February 1, we simply made plans to join their effort by sitting in at the same chains. . . . We were surprised and delighted to hear reports of other cities joining in the sit-ins. We started feeling the power of the idea whose time had come. We had no inkling that the move ment would become so widespread. On February 27, 1960, Nash led students to a third sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Nashville. A group of young white thugs attacked the sitters. The police were called to break up the fight. They arrested Diane Nash and 80 other black students, but did not detain the white instigators. Two days later, a judge fined the black students $50.