For many people, it is said that the Civil Rights Movement started in the 1960s - though this was where it certainly reached its apex, and some argue that the fight for civil rights continues, one of the most important events in civil rights history actually happened in North Carolina - the Greensboro sit-ins. North Carolina, in at least the past century, has been a battleground for civil rights, from the Jim Crow laws of the late 19th century to today. The state itself has had its fair share of good and bad events regarding the fight for rights for African-Americans, many of which have been considered important milestones in the Civil Rights Movement.
North Carolina was deeply entrenched in the laws of the Jim Crow south, where segregation was king; blacks and whites were forced to attend different schools, drink from different water fountains, and were forced to sit in different places in buses. In the 1930s, black ministers in Greensboro boycotted the opening of the War Memorial Auditorium, and theater boycotts were also performed by black activists. In the wake of the beginning of the Civil Rights movement and the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, many North Carolina schools avoided complying with the decision - the Pearsall plan was implemented by several leaders, both white and black, to stop or at least delay integration (as they felt it would not work).
However, the most important event to take place in Carolina (or potentially the country) with regards to the Civil Rights Movement were the Greensboro sit-ins. In 1960, a group of nonviolent protests happened in Woolworth's department stores in Greensboro, North Carolina, where black would "sit in" at the lunch counters, directly contradicting the segregation policy the store had. These were definitely not the first sit-ins to occur in the Movement, but they were certainly some of the most publicized. First started by four students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, the movement soon spread to more than three hundred black students, and news and TV stations were covering the event. This event sparked sit-ins in other areas of North Carolina towns, like Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte and more. The sit-in spread throughout the south from there, with mixed results of peaceful demonstration and violence. The media attention that the Greensboro sit-ins gathered created a great deal of national sentiment for blacks, spreading the Civil Rights Movement and its peaceful demonstrations all over the country.
While early North Carolina and its people participated in the same system of segregation that kept blacks and whites apart, it was also the site of one of the turning points for the Civil Rights Movement altogether. The Greensboro sit-ins proved to be some of the most important gestures of peaceful protest in the movement, and the attention they gathered helped to make integration and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 possible.
Works Cited
North Carolina History Project. "Civil Rights Movement." North Carolina History Project. Web.
1 Aug. 2012.
Ready, Milton. The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina. University of South Carolina
Press; 2005.
Schlosser, Jim. "Timeline." Greensboro Sit-ins. Ed. Teresa Prout. 2008. News and Record. Feb.
2, 2009
