At an 18 April news conference in Ithaca, New York, former president Truman declared that the southern lunch counter demonstrations were engineered by Communists.1 Truman later reportedly stated: “If anyone came into my store and tried to stop business I’d throw him out. The Negro should behave himself and show he’s a good citizen.
In the following article published in The Progressive, King predicts that “time will reveal that the students are learning lessons not contained in their textbooks.” 1 He places the sit-ins within the context of a historic and international drive for equality: “Young people have connected up with their own history—the slave revolts, the incomplete revolution of the Civil War; the brotherhood of colonial colored men in Africa and Asia.
On 19 October—three days after the close of the SNCC conference—Atlanta police arrested King and student activists who had requested service at the Magnolia Room, a segregated restaurant at Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta.1 Organized by the Atlanta Committee on an Appeal for Human Rights the sit-in was one of several conducted simultaneously at lunch counters throughout the city.2 After charges were dropped against many of the
Over two hundred student and adult activists gathered at Shaw University for an Easter weekend youth conference to discuss the growing sit-in movement.1 King issued this statement at a press conference on the opening day of the meeting.2 Among his five suggestions for “a strategy for victory,” King recommends that the students form a permanent nonviolent organization to “take the freedom struggle into every community in the South without e
On 1 February four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, took seats at the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter.1 Refused service on the basis of a custom that reserved seats for white patrons, the students continued to sit at the counter until closing time. Within a week, several hundred Greensboro-area students were participating in sitdown demonstrations, which had expanded to another downtown store.
Almost six months after the first Youth March for Integrated Schools, King addresses some twenty-six thousand people at the Sylvan Theater on the grounds of the Washington Monument.1 This effort, spearheaded by A.
In this interview from Challenge, a publication of the Young Peoples Socialist League, King responds to questions regarding the broader implications of the civil rights struggle.1 He argues that “complete political, economic and social equality” requires “a whole series of measures which go beyond the specific issue of segregation” and explains that the success of this struggle will depend on the realization of a “gigantic and integrated alliance of the progressive social forces in the United Sta
