Nonviolent Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement
CIVIL RIGHTS VOICES Franklin McCain I certainly wasn’t afraid And I wasn’t afraid because I was too angry to be afraid Franklin McCain was one of the Greensboro Four whose nonviolent protest at the Woolworth’s lunch counter helped sit-ins spread throughout the South He graduated from college with a degree in chemistry and biology in 1964 The next year he married Bettye Davis who also took part in the Greensboro sit-ins He went on to work with multiple civil rights organizations In 1991 McCain was recognized with an honorary doctorate degree for his role in the civil rights movement 6 The waitress was following store rules The lunch counter was segregated Segregation rules said African Americans had to do things separately from whites The Woolworth’s lunch counter was marked Whites Only The young men were college freshmen They had been talking about segregation for months They had each experienced it and knew it was wrong They wanted to resist segregation by refusing to obey the unjust rules
Students peacefully wait to be served during the second day of the Greensboro sit-ins They decided to hold a sit-in They chose Woolworth’s because it had both a store and a lunch counter They wanted to show that Woolworth’s was being unfair Woolworth’s was willing to take their money in the store But it would not let them sit at the lunch counter The store’s manager asked the students to leave They refused As they sat some white people gathered to watch them Many called the young men insulting names The students sat and waited When the store closed for the day they got up and left 7
By February 6 approximately 400 African-American men and women had joined the Greensboro sit-ins As the young men returned to their dorms they were elated They felt they had done something important They had stood up to unfairness They were not the first to fight unjust laws in a peaceful way They were not the first to hold a sit-in But they did start something big that day Over the next several days hundreds of Greensboro students held sit-ins throughout the city And over the next few months sit-ins spread throughout the South 8
Nonviolent Resistance in the United States The students who sat in at Woolworth’s were practicing nonviolent resistance They resisted by choosing to disobey the rules of segregation They were nonviolent meaning they did not fight back even though others insulted them By sitting where they were not supposed to they quietly showed they thought the law was wrong African Americans faced segregation laws in many areas of their lives There were laws that said where they could and could not live laws that said where they could and could not sit and laws that kept them from getting jobs African Americans wanted a way to effectively show that they were not being treated fairly Many civil rights activists looked to Mohandas Gandhi’s example on how to effectively protest Gandhi fought injustice in India from the 1920s to the 1940s The British government ruled India for much of that time 9
