The Nonviolent Strategy of a Sit-in

by C. Eric Lincoln

Atlanta If no wool-hat politicians from the rural counties are loitering about with their ears cocked for subversive conversation, both Negro and white natives are apt to boast that Atlanta is "the New York of the South."
One morning last March, sophisticated Atlanta was rudely jarred by the realization that it was like New York in ways it had never particularly noticed before: its Negro minority was not at all timid about expressing its dissatisfaction and demanding action in no uncertain terms. In fact, there in the morning Atlanta Constitution was a full-page advertisement entitled "An Appeal for Human Rights," and the list of rights the Negroes said they wanted ranged all the way from the right of attending the public schools of Georgia on a non-
1	Martin Luther King, Jr., "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," Chris
tian Century, April 13, 1960, p. 440.
2	Ibid., p. 44.
292       NON-VIOLENT  POWER WITH EXPRESS   PRINCIPLE
segregated basis to being admitted to hospitals, concerts, and restaurants on the same basis as anybody else. The home-bound commuters got the same message in a full-page advertisement in the evening Journal, which, according to its masthead, "Covers Dixie Like the Dew."
The advertisement, signed by six Negro students representing the six Negro colleges in Atlanta, said in part:
"We, the students of the six affiliated institutions forming the Atlanta University Center—Clark, Morehouse, Morris Brown and Spelman colleges, Atlanta University and the Interdenominational Theological Center—have joined our hearts, minds and bodies in the cause of gaining those rights which are inherently ours as members of the human race and as citizens of the United States . . .
"We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours. . . . Today's youth will not sit by submissively, while being denied all rights, privileges, and joys of life. . . .
"We must say in all candor that we plan to use every legal and non-violent means at our disposal to secure full citizenship rights as members of this great Democracy. ..."
The reaction in Atlanta, a city known for its more or less amicable race relations, was swift and vigorous. In the white community there was genuine amazement over the dissatisfaction of the Negro students. After all, in Atlanta many Negroes own expensive homes, run substantial businesses, and practice the professions with a high degree of respect in the community at large.
Predictably, white reaction polarized along urban-rural political lines. Mayor William B. Hartsfield, whose qualifications as a hardheaded Southern liberal are rated high by many of the most militant advocates of Negro rights, praised the statement and said that it "performs the constructive service of letting the white community know what others are thinking."
But a few blocks away in the state capitol, Governor Ernest Vandiver denounced the student appeal as a "left-wing statement . . . calculated to breed dissatisfaction, discontent, discord and evil." The Georgia governor had been elected on a platform of total segregation by a predominantly rural electorate voting under Georgia's so-called county-unit system. Under the county-unit rules, a vote cast by a semi-literate sharecropper in rural Echols County (with a population of 2,494) has ninety-odd times the value of a vote cast by an Emory University professor voting in Atlanta, which has a metropolitan population of more than one million. The governor did go so far as to admit that the appeal for human rights was "skillfully prepared"—so well prepared in fact, that "Obvi-
NON-VIOLENCE  AND  THE  AMERICAN  NEGRO	293
ously, it was not written by students." According to Governor Vandiver, "It did not sound like it was prepared in any Georgia school or college." (The italics are mine but the grammar is his.)
The governor could have been more generous in his estimate of the quality of education in Georgia. As far as Negroes are concerned, Atlanta, with six private and church-related institutions of higher learning, has long been a unique educational center. It is estimated that at least ten per cent of all Negro Ph.D.s in America received their undergraduate training in Atlanta. And the students of the Atlanta University Center were soon to exhibit a remarkable degree of skill at dramatizing their determination to have the rights to which they feel entitled.
The sit-in movement in Atlanta was born in a corner drugstore opposite the Atlanta University Center, when a handful of students from the several Negro colleges found themselves discussing the sit-ins already in progress in North Carolina and elsewhere. A mass meeting at Atlanta University early last March resulted in the formation of a Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, which several days later drew up the statement enumerating their grievances and calling upon "all people in authority ... all leaders in civic life . . . and all people of goodwill to assert themselves and abolish these injustices."
To test the receptiveness of white Atlantans to the attempted desegregation of public and semi-public facilities, the students sought to attend a musical at the city auditorium with tickets for orchestra seats ordered in advance; and they "sat in" for service at a lunch counter at Rich's, the largest department store in the Southeast. At the municipal auditorium they were permitted to occupy the seats for which they held tickets, but the section in which they sat was promptly designated a Negro section by the management, and seating continued on a de facto segregated basis. At Rich's the students were served on March 3 and 4, but thereafter, and without prior notice, they were refused. The Appeal for Human Rights followed, but neither the newspaper advertisements nor attempts at negotiation with Rich's and the other major downtown stores produced results.
At Rich's—which stretches almost a full block on either side of Forsyth Street—one can buy anything from a packet of pins to a passage to Paris. It is generally assumed that from seventy to ninety per cent of the Negroes in Atlanta's business and professional class have maintained accounts there. When no satisfactory agreement could be reached with the management of the store, the students threw picket lines in front of it and urged all Negroes to cancel their accounts and practice "selective purchasing"—that is, to spend their money somewhere
294       NON-VIOLENT  POWER WITH  EXPRESS   PRINCIPLE
else. This was to be the first in a series of skirmishes with the giant store, a kind of field maneuver in preparation for an all-out campaign in the fall.
By the time the colleges were closed for summer vacation, the student movement had taken on some of the aspects of a permanent organization. The Committee on Appeal for Human Rights had developed into a kind of general staff, and several operating committees with specific functions had been set up under its aegis. A Student-Adult Liaison Committee had been established to interpret the student movement to the Negro community and to enlist its support. On this committee were business executives, college presidents, professors, lawyers, other Negro leaders, and students.
The adult members of the liaison committee also served in an advisory capacity on request, but they were excluded from all student meetings dealing with policy and strategy. As one student leader has explained, "We preferred not to embarrass or otherwise discompose our adult leaders; they may have vested interests or personal obligations which may make it difficult for them to share directly in our deliberations, or in our strategy and the implementation of policy." Nonetheless, the sit-ins got overwhelming support from Negro adults, both direct and indirect. For one thing, during the summer a great many adults learned to get along without the convenience of charge accounts at the downtown stores. One group of businessmen underwrote a modest newspaper called the Atlanta Inquirer, edited by a college professor and largely staffed by students.
After most of the college students had scattered for their summer vacations, a switch in tactics directed the summer "field maneuvers" at chain grocery stores that have outlets in Negro neighborhoods but discriminate against Negroes in their employment practices. Except for "selective purchasing," the main campaign against the downtown stores was postponed until fall.
The summer "maneuvers" were directed mainly at units of Colonial Stores and at some smaller businesses located in areas with from ninety-five to one hundred per cent Negro patronage. When the stores refused to negotiate with the students on the question of hiring Negroes above the level of menials, picket lines were organized and a selective purchasing campaign was urged upon Negro housewives. The chief target, a Colonial store near the heart of the Negro business district on the city's Northwest Side, suddenly "closed for remodeling." A few days later it reopened with Negroes upgraded in three departments. Shortly thereafter a second store in the Colonial chain hired a Negro cashier and a Negro butcher. Two smaller
NON-VIOLENCE AND  THE  AMERICAN  NEGRO	295
stores had either already employed Negro salespersons or did so immediately after Colonial changed its policies.
What came to be referred to as the "Fall Campaign" got under way immediately after the reopening of the colleges in mid-September. This time the main sit-in targets were in the heart of the Atlanta shopping district. Because of its size and its alleged "leadership" in the maintenance of segregated facilities, Rich's became once again the prime objective. Encouraged, however, by the fact that in the seven months since the sit-ins had begun in Greensboro, North Carolina, 112 Southern cities had desegregated lunch counters. The students added Davison-Paxon, the second largest store in Atlanta, as well as drug chains such as Lane-Rexall and Walgreen and the dime and variety stores, including Woolworth, Kress, W. T. Grant, McCrory, Newberry, and H. L. Green. Accommodations were requested at all facilities—lunch counters, rest rooms, and in the case of the department stores, restaurants and dining rooms.
The stores refused to negotiate with the students, and beginning on October 19 a succession of sit-ins harassed the downtown merchants and brought out scores of extra police and plainclothes detectives. By Friday, October 21, hundreds of students had launched attacks in co-ordinated waves. Service to anyone at eating facilities in the stores involved had all but ended, and sixty-one students, one white heckler, and Dr. Martin Luther King were all in jail. Under a truce called by Mayor Hartsfield everyone was out of jail by Sunday morning except Dr. King. Negotiations between the merchants and the Students-Adult Liaison Committee were promised on the initiative of the mayor. When the truce ended thirty days later, no progress had been made in settling the impasse, and on November 25, the all-out attack was resumed. By mid-December, Christmas buying was down sixteen per cent—almost $10 million below normal.
Both the Atlanta police and the merchants have been baffled by the students' apparent ability to appear out of nowhere armed with picket signs, and by the high degree of co-ordination with which simultaneous attacks were mounted against several stores at once. Even members of the Ku Klux Klan, dressed in full regalia and prepared to counterdemonstrate against the students, frequently found themselves wandering around the downtown streets bemused—always a jump or two behind the sit-in students. The secret of their easy mobility lay in the organization the students had perfected in anticipation of an extended siege.
Much of the credit for the development of the organizational scheme belongs to Lonnie King, a Morehouse student who is the recognized leader of the student movement in
296      NON-VIOLENT  POWER WITH EXPRESS  PRINCIPLE
Atlanta, and his immediate "general staff." Policymaking is done by a board of about fifteen students, constituting the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, which interprets and tries to make effective the wishes of the students of the six colleges who are loosely joined together in what is known as the Atlanta Student Movement. The committee is co-chaired by Lonnie King and Herschelle Sullivan, a twenty-two-year-old senior at Spelman College. Its executive officer has the rather whimsical title of "le Commandante."
Le Commandante is Fred C. Bennette, a pre-theology student at Morris Brown College. The headquarters of the movement are in the basement of a church near the University Center, and Bennette arrives there promptly at seven o'clock each morning and goes through a stack of neatly typed reports covering the previous day's operations. On the basis of these reports, the strategy for the day is planned.
By eight o'clock the first contingent of volunteers for the day's assignment has arrived; there may be anywhere between twenty-five and a hundred students present. There is a brief devotional period, which usually concludes with a prayer that the white people of Georgia and throughout the United States will learn to overcome their prejudices, and that the students will be restrained, non-violent, and loving in their attempts to establish human dignity in Georgia. After the devotions, the student volunteers may go to the church kitchen for coffee and doughnuts provided by various adult organizations. They are then likely to scatter about the church looking for places to study until they are summoned for duty.
Meanwhile, le Commandante and his staff are in conference. Robert ("Tex") Felder, Deputy Chief of Operations and a second-year student at the Interdenominational Theological Center, will have arrived, as will a fellow student, the Reverend Otis Moss, who serves as field commander for the committee. Morris J. Dillard of Morehouse and James Felder of Clark College, who serve as co-chairmen of a subcommittee on public relations, will be on hand, and le Commandante will also expect to hear a report from a Clark College senior, Benjamin Brown, who keeps the organization's books and acts as its treasurer. Telephoned reports from Senior Intelligence Officer Daniel Mitchell, a Clark junior (already at his post downtown), will describe the nature of the flow of traffic at each potential target.
The general staff having concluded its deliberations, a number of pickets selected on the basis of their class schedules and the nature of the day's objectives will be assembled and briefed by Deputy Commander Robert Felder. A large map dividing the downtown district into five areas is invariably consulted and an Area Commander is appointed for each operational
NON-VIOLENCE  AND  THE  AMERICAN  NEGRO	297
district. Assignments fall into three categories: pickets (called by the students "picketeers"), sit-ins, and a sort of flying squad called "sit-and-runs." The objective of the sit-and-runs is simply to close lunch counters by putting in an appearance and requesting service. When the merchants discontinue service to all rather than serve the Negroes, the sit-and-runs move on to another target. The group designated "sit-ins" are prepared to contest their right to be served and are willing to go to jail if need be. Those volunteering for sit-in duty agree not to request bail if they are arrested.
By now it is nine or nine-thirty, and transportation has arrived. Cars provided without charge by funeral homes or other businesses as well as by individual housewives and some students are waiting to be loaded. The Deputy Commander provides each driver with a driver's orientation sheet outlining in detail the route to be followed by each driver, and the places where each of the respective groups of students are to be let out. The Area Commanders are given final instructions concerning the synchronization of the attack, and the cars move off, following different routes into the city.
In one of the last cars to leave headquarters will be the Deputy Field Commander, who with a selected squad of "stand-bys" will be driven to his "field headquarters" on the "Ramparts," a designation referring to the steps of the Post Office annex across the street from Rich's department store.
Meanwhile, Field Commander Otis Moss is checking a communications code with Ernest Brown, an eighteen-year-old Morehouse junior, or one of the five other licensed radio operators who man a short-wave radio set up in the church nursery. When this has been attended to, Commander Moss climbs into an ancient automobile equipped with a short-wave sending and receiving unit and heads for the downtown shopping district. He is accompanied by Robert Allen, eighteen, a Morehouse junior majoring in physics, whose job it will be to man the mobile radio unit.
The students have scarcely been deployed before a delivery truck arrives with a crate of apples and a dozen loaves of bread. These are from a small storekeeper who wants to contribute to the cause. Other gifts of food, cigarettes, and soft drinks arrive during the course of the morning. A housewife brings in a half-dozen pies; an insurance executive calls to say that he will underwrite the cost of $115 worth of printing the students have contracted for. A small service station will give a hundred gallons of gasoline. All such gifts are recorded and notes of thanks are written to the donors by members of a subcommittee on community support. By eleven o'clock a group of churchwomen have arrived to prepare lunch for the students.
298      NON-VIOLENT  POWER WITH  EXPRESS  PRINCIPLE
Reports from the Field and Area Commanders begin to trickle in by radio and telephone. As the lunch hour nears, the volume of reports will increase to one every two or three minutes. The reports are typed and dated and placed on the desk of le Commandante by a corps of young women who serve as "Communications Aides." Duplicates are posted on the bulletin board and the students remaining at headquarters crowd around to watch the fortunes of their colleagues downtown. Here are two actual reports taken from the files and approved for publication by the Security Officer:
11/26/60	11:05 AM
From: Captain Lenora Tait
To: le Commandante
Lunch counters at Rich's closed. Proceeded to alternative
objective. Counters at Woolworth's also closed. Back to
Rich's for picket duty. Ku Klux Klan circling Rich's in
night gowns and dunce caps. "Looking good!"
From: Gwendolyn Lee To: le Commandante
Sign has been torn from the back of one of our white picketeers. He got another sign and returned to the line. Morale of white picketeers very good. Known heckler, an old man in a gray suit, is on the scene. White opposition increasing. Plainclothes detective made co-ordinator keep moving. All picketeers now in front of Rich's.
The white pickets referred to were from Emory University, a segregated Methodist college in Atlanta. White students from the University of Georgia have also joined the Negro students in the picket lines.
Negro students have sometimes been kicked and beaten, and one student, Elroy Emory of Morris Brown College, has been repeatedly singled out for attack by a group of black-jacketed young white men who come regularly to heckle the Negro pickets. The Ku Klux Klan has mounted counterdem-onstrations on at least two occasions, and has threatened to call a white boycott against any store that desegregates its eating facilities.
The downtown merchants and the Atlanta police have deplored the Klan's meddling, as have the Atlanta newspapers. It has been the Negro students who have insisted that the Klan's right to demonstrate ought to be protected. When the Klan turned out in force on Saturday, December 10—red, white, and green satin gowns, hoods and all—to demonstrate against the students and the newspapers, the students called a mass meeting for six o'clock the next morning "to pray for
NON-VIOLENCE AND THE AMERICAN NEGRO	299
our white brothers of the Ku Klux Klan." Nearly five thousand students and adults made their way to Herndon Stadium before daylight, and stood bareheaded in a cold rain to be led in prayer by the Reverend William Holmes Borders for the spiritual enlightenment of the Ku Klux Klan. That night a bomb wrecked a Negro elementary school a few blocks from the scene of the early-morning prayer meeting.
The sit-ins continue, a somber prelude to the school desegregation problems Atlanta will have to face next September. Support from adult Negroes is firm and consistent, and professional men and women have joined the students in the picket lines on "Doctors' Day," "Nurses' Day," and even "Professors' Day."
In some cases the students have been encouraged by white clerks and other personnel working in the very stores against which the sit-ins are directed. At least one sympathetic white woman living in Atlanta's exclusive Buckhead section fired her maid when the maid admitted that she had crossed the picket line at Rich's to buy a dress. Another white woman who had been watching the New Orleans spectacle on television called an official at one of the Negro colleges to ask that the Negroes continue to pray that the white race be forgiven for its behavior toward Negroes and that the students be encouraged to continue their efforts.
There seems little doubt that the efforts will be continued. The Negro students and their white and black allies are determined to keep on sitting in, sitting and running, and picketing until their battle is won.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT:

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Caption:
Martin Luther King being arrested, Atlanta sit-in, October 19, 1960; courtesy clarionledger.com