revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

43
four freshmen at A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat in at a
Woolworth lunch counter downtown .
In a matter of days the idea leaped to
other cities in North Carolina . During the next two weeks, sit-ins spread
to fifteen cities in five southern states . Within the following year, over
50,000 people, most were blacks and some whites, participated in some kind
of demonstration or another in a
hundred cities and over 3,600 demonstrators
spent time in jail . In a year, several hundred counters had been desegregated
in Southern cities .
The main centers of protest were Nashville,
Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, and Orangeburg, South Carolina .
Nearly 1,300 arrests had been made by this time . . There
were 400 arrests in Orangeburg, about 150 in Nashville, nearly
40 in each of Tallahassee and Florence (South Carolina), about
80 in Atlanta, about 65 in Memphis and nearly 85 in Marshall,
Texas . In the North, college students staged supporting demonstrations
and raised funds for arrested Southern students .
The focus of the sit-ins was broadening to include libraries,
museums, and art galleries ; the methods . . . . were . . . .
wade-ins, stand-ins, kneel-ins and other forms of non-violent
direct action . 35
Miss Ella Baker, an organizer for SCLC, decided to hold a conference
bringing together the sit-in leaders .
She asked SCLC to underwrite it
financially .
Miss Baker went to her alma mater, Shaw University, to secure
facilities for a meeting of about a hundred students . By the time of the
conference on April
15-17, 1960, demonstrations had spread so fast there
were sixty centers of sit-in activity .
Also, nineteen Northern colleges
were interested enough to send delegates .
Over two-hundred people came to
the conference on Easter Weekend, one-hundred twenty-six student delegates
from fifty-eight different Southern communities in twelve states . 36
35 Ibid ., p . 42 .
36 Howard Zinn, SNCC (Boston : Beacon Press, 1964), p . 3 .