The Struggle for Civil Rights, Player’s Handbook (Canada and USA Addresses)

The success of Civil Rights campaigns in the 50s, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, inspired further activities in the 1960s. The student sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Greensboro, NC, in early 1960, were an example of a nonviolent protest that struck a chord, with both supporters and detractors. People who supported the students, often students themselves, saw it as a polite effort to do sometime fairly simple and fundamental: eat at a lunch counter. The students who openly broke the segregation laws were not demanding food for free; they asked politely and had money to pay, just as anyone might. It seemed absurd that such a basic need would be denied just because society was still in the habit of living out a system of segregation. Other students soon wanted to follow the example of those in the Greensboro Woolworth store.

But the sit-ins also drew the attention of local, European-Americans, some of whom decided to do their best to make the sit-in experience as unpleasant as possible, by harassing those who participated (whether the protesters were European-American or African-American). They poured ketchup and sugar on the protesters; some put out their cigarettes on the back of protester’s necks. These were the less violent ones. Those people who were more violent used bats to harm some of the protesters.

Here, however, the protesters were drawing out the contradiction of the Jim Crow South. How could people claim that segregation was the best and most proper way to order relations in society, when it allowed such ignorance, hatred and violence to fester under a facade of civility? How could segregation be regarded as necessary to guard the moral purity of European-American children, if many of them could carry out such atrocious actions as they entered adulthood?

Drawing out this contradiction was difficult and dangerous, however. The emotional and physical toll on the protests themselves was high enough. But there was also the toll of going to jail, where the temperament of the police officers, in many cases, did not differ significantly from that of the local, European-Americans who had harassed them at the lunch counter.

Initially, organizers raised funds to make bail, but by early 1961, such efforts were draining money that civil rights organizations needed. Members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to reverse things and opt for “jail, not bail” in order to shift the financial strain away from civil rights organizations, and put it on the local, segregationist establishment instead. Tom Gaither, a CORE field secretary, led a group of students from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, SC, in a sit-in at a local McCrory’s store. The majority did not post bail and spent a month on a prison farm doing menial labor, but their actions drew support, while taxing the resources of the establishment. They sang protest songs to keep their spirits up.

Some of this approach was used in the protests in Albany, GA, the following year. Between 1961 and 1962, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized protest activities to address an array of problems and ultimately to end segregation, but there were soon difficulties between various local and national groups.

One of the initial problems was, in some ways, generational. African-American adults in Albany who had leadership positions in local the chapter of the NAACP and similar organizations did not collaborate well with the younger SNCC organizers who had come to town. Some felt that their community already had organizations in place, and were doing their best to address problems themselves. Some distrusted outsiders who were unaware of the local history. Two SNCC organizers, Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon, began to devote less time to working with adults in Albany, and more time trying to organize high school and college-age members of the African-American community. This seemed to further distance them from adults in the community, some of whom did not want to be seen with the SNCC organizers in public. Officials at the local Albany State College tried to discourage students from working with SNCC, eventually dismissing some and threatening to expel others. The adults in the African-American community, by and large, also seemed uncomfortable with the kinds of activities that SNCC was planning, such as testing local compliance with the new Interstate Commerce Commission’s regulations banning segregation at places of interstate travel (regulations prompted by the bloody “freedom rides” that CORE, SCLC and SNCC had carried out recently).

In the wake of what some regard as a failure and a slowing down in the momentum of the civil rights movement, King and others decided that they needed to meet face to face to discuss what would be the best way to go forward. A retreat at Dorchester, GA, was planned for 1963, so that SCLC and others could better plan how to move forward with protests in Birmingham, AL, Louisville, KY, or wherever.