1.
National Register of Historic Places
–
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States federal governments official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation. The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 established the National Register, of the more than one million properties on the National Register,80,000 are listed individually. The remainder are contributing resources within historic districts, each year approximately 30,000 properties are added to the National Register as part of districts or by individual listings. For most of its history the National Register has been administered by the National Park Service and its goals are to help property owners and interest groups, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, coordinate, identify, and protect historic sites in the United States. While National Register listings are mostly symbolic, their recognition of significance provides some financial incentive to owners of listed properties, protection of the property is not guaranteed. During the nomination process, the property is evaluated in terms of the four criteria for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, the application of those criteria has been the subject of criticism by academics of history and preservation, as well as the public and politicians. Occasionally, historic sites outside the proper, but associated with the United States are also listed. Properties can be nominated in a variety of forms, including individual properties, historic districts, the Register categorizes general listings into one of five types of properties, district, site, structure, building, or object. National Register Historic Districts are defined geographical areas consisting of contributing and non-contributing properties, some properties are added automatically to the National Register when they become administered by the National Park Service. These include National Historic Landmarks, National Historic Sites, National Historical Parks, National Military Parks/Battlefields, National Memorials, on October 15,1966, the Historic Preservation Act created the National Register of Historic Places and the corresponding State Historic Preservation Offices. Initially, the National Register consisted of the National Historic Landmarks designated before the Registers creation, approval of the act, which was amended in 1980 and 1992, represented the first time the United States had a broad-based historic preservation policy. To administer the newly created National Register of Historic Places, the National Park Service of the U. S. Department of the Interior, hartzog, Jr. established an administrative division named the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation. Hartzog charged OAHP with creating the National Register program mandated by the 1966 law, ernest Connally was the Offices first director. Within OAHP new divisions were created to deal with the National Register, the first official Keeper of the Register was William J. Murtagh, an architectural historian. During the Registers earliest years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, organization was lax and SHPOs were small, understaffed, and underfunded. A few years later in 1979, the NPS history programs affiliated with both the U. S. National Parks system and the National Register were categorized formally into two Assistant Directorates. Established were the Assistant Directorate for Archeology and Historic Preservation and the Assistant Directorate for Park Historic Preservation, from 1978 until 1981, the main agency for the National Register was the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service of the United States Department of the Interior. In February 1983, the two assistant directorates were merged to promote efficiency and recognize the interdependency of their programs, jerry L. Rogers was selected to direct this newly merged associate directorate
2.
Church (building)
–
A church building, often simply called a church, is a building used for Christian religious activities, particularly worship services. The term in its sense is most often used by Christians to refer to their religious buildings. In traditional Christian architecture, the church is arranged in the shape of a Christian cross. When viewed from plan view the longest part of a cross is represented by the aisle, towers or domes are often added with the intention of directing the eye of the viewer towards the heavens and inspiring church visitors. The earliest identified Christian church was a church founded between 233 and 256. During the 11th through 14th centuries, a wave of building of cathedrals, a cathedral is a church, usually Roman Catholic, Anglican, Oriental Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox, housing the seat of a bishop. In standard Greek usage, the word ecclesia was retained to signify both a specific edifice of Christian worship, and the overall community of the faithful. This usage was retained in Latin and the languages derived from Latin, as well as in the Celtic languages. In the Germanic and some Slavic languages, the word kyriak-ós/-ē/-ón was adopted instead, in Old English the sequence of derivation started as cirice, then churche, and eventually church in its current pronunciation. German Kirche, Scottish kirk, Russian церковь, etc. are all similarly derived, according to the New Testament, the earliest Christians did not build church buildings. Instead, they gathered in homes or in Jewish worship places like the Second Temple or synagogues, the earliest archeologically identified Christian church is a house church, the Dura-Europos church, founded between 233 and 256. During the 11th through 14th centuries, a wave of building of cathedrals, in addition to being a place of worship, the cathedral or parish church was used by the community in other ways. It could serve as a place for guilds or a hall for banquets. Mystery plays were performed in cathedrals, and cathedrals might also be used for fairs. The church could be used as a place to thresh and store grain, a common architecture for churches is the shape of a cross. These churches also often have a dome or other large vaulted space in the interior to represent or draw attention to the heavens. Other common shapes for churches include a circle, to represent eternity, or an octagon or similar star shape, another common feature is the spire, a tall tower on the west end of the church or over the crossing. The Latin word basilica was used to describe a Roman public building
3.
Martin Luther King Jr.
–
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, with the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech, on October 14,1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, in the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled Beyond Vietnam. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D. C. to be called the Poor Peoples Campaign, Kings death was followed by riots in many U. S. cities. Ray, who fled the country, was arrested two months later at London Heathrow Airport, King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, hundreds of streets in the U. S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also renamed for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, King was born on January 15,1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. It was during this time he chose to be called Martin Luther King in honor of the German reformer Martin Luther, King had Irish ancestry through his paternal great-grandfather, as well as African ancestry. King was a child, between an older sister, Willie Christine King, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King. King sang with his choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie Gone with the Wind. His mother was an accomplished organist and choir leader, and she took him to various churches to sing and he received attention for singing I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus. King later became a member of the choir in his church. King said that his father regularly whipped him until he was fifteen, King saw his fathers proud and fearless protests against segregation, such as King Sr. When King was a child, he befriended a boy whose father owned a business near his familys home. When the boys were six, they started school, King had to attend a school for African Americans, King lost his friend because the childs father no longer wanted the boys to play together. King suffered from depression throughout much of his life, in his adolescent years, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the racial humiliation that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure in the segregated South
4.
Montgomery bus boycott
–
Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional. Many important figures in the Civil Rights Movement took part in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. the local background for the Montgomery bus boycott lies in growing abuse and humiliation of the black passengers by white bus drivers due to three main reasons. First, drivers increasingly abused passengers due to their own frustrations over labor disputes, third, the 1954 Brown decision also resulted in increased animosity of bus drivers towards blacks -- many of whom joined the White Citizens Councils. On February 25,1953, the Baton Rouge, Louisiana city-parish council passed Ordinance 222, however, the ordinance was largely unenforced by the city bus drivers. The drivers later went on strike after city authorities refused to arrest Rev. T. J, Jemison for sitting in a front row. Four days after the strike began, Louisiana Attorney General and former Baton Rouge mayor Fred S. LeBlanc declared the ordinance unconstitutional under Louisiana state law and this led Rev. Jemison to organize what historians believe to be the first bus boycott of the civil rights movement. The boycott ended after eight days when an agreement was reached to only retain the first two front and back rows as racially reserved seating areas. On March 2,1955, Colvin was handcuffed, arrested, at the time, Colvin was an active member in the NAACP Youth Council, a group to which Rosa Parks served as Advisor. Colvins legal case formed the core of Browder v. Gayle, but neither the Supreme Courts Morgan ruling nor the ICCs Keys ruling addressed the matter of Jim Crow travel within the individual states. Under the system of segregation used on Montgomery buses, the ten front seats were reserved for whites at all times, the ten back seats were supposed to be reserved for blacks at all times. The middle section of the bus consisted of sixteen unreserved seats for whites, whites filled the middle seats from the front to back, and blacks filled seats from the back to front until the bus was full. If other black people boarded the bus, they were required to stand, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white person, she was sitting in the first line of the middle section. Often when boarding the buses, black people were required to pay at the front, get off, occasionally, bus drivers would drive away before black passengers were able to reboard. National City Lines owned the Montgomery Bus Line at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was a seamstress by profession, she was also the secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. Twelve years before her history-making arrest, Parks was stopped from boarding a city bus by driver James F. Blake, Parks vowed never again to ride a bus driven by Blake. As a member of the NAACP, Parks was an investigator assigned to cases of sexual assault, in 1945, she was sent to Abbeville, Alabama, to investigate the gang rape of Recy Taylor. The protest that arose around the Taylor case was the first instance of a civil rights protest. In 1955, Parks completed a course in Race Relations at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee where nonviolent civil disobedience had been discussed as a tactic, on December 1,1955, Parks was sitting in the frontmost row for black people
5.
Alabama State Capitol
–
The Alabama State Capitol, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the First Confederate Capitol, is the state capitol building for Alabama. It is located on Capitol Hill, originally Goat Hill, in Montgomery and it was declared a National Historic Landmark on December 19,1960. Alabama has had five capitals during its history. The first was the capital in St. Stephens in 1817, followed by the state convention in Huntsville in 1819. It was then moved to Tuscaloosa in 1826, until coming to rest in Montgomery in 1846, the current structure is the states fourth purpose-built capitol building, with the first at Cahaba, the second at Tuscaloosa, and the last two in Montgomery. The first capitol building in Montgomery, located where the current building stands, the current building was completed in 1851, although additional wings were added over the course of the following 140 years. Meeting in the Senate Chamber, the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States was drawn up by the Montgomery Convention on February 4,1861, the convention also adopted the Permanent Constitution here on March 11,1861. Architecturally, the building is Greek Revival in style with some Beaux-Arts influences, the central core of the building, as well as the east wing to the rear of the structure, is three-stories over a below-grade basement. The north and south wings are two-stories over a raised basement, the front facade that is seen today is approximately 350 feet wide and 119 feet tall from ground level to the top of the lantern on the dome. The first capitol building to be built in Montgomery was designed by Stephen Decatur Button of Philadelphia, andrew Dexter, one of Montgomerys founders, kept a prime piece of property empty in anticipation of the capital eventually being moved to Montgomery from Tuscaloosa. This property, atop what was known as Goat Hill due to its use as a pasture, was chosen as the site for the new capitol building. Construction began in 1846, with the new building presented to the state on December 6,1847, Button credited much of his architectural inspiration to Minard Lafevers Beauties of Modern Architecture. Buttons building was stuccoed brick, with two stories set over a rusticated raised basement. A two story portico with six Composite columns, topped by a broad pediment, was centered on the middle five bays of the front elevation. A central dome,40 feet in diameter, sat directly on a ring at the main roof level behind the portico. The dome was crowned with an elaborate lantern patterned after the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates and this first capitol building burned on December 14,1849, little more than two years after its completion. The ruins were cleared by March 1850, with a new building soon to follow, the current capitol building was built from 1850 to 1851, with Barachias Holt as supervising architect. Holt, originally from Exeter, Maine, was a mechanic by trade
6.
African Americans
–
African Americans are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The term may also be used to only those individuals who are descended from enslaved Africans. As a compound adjective the term is usually hyphenated as African-American, Black and African Americans constitute the third largest racial and ethnic group in the United States. Most African Americans are of West and Central African descent and are descendants of enslaved peoples within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of 73. 2–80. 9% West African, 18–24% European, according to US Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-identify as African American. The overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities, immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American and South American nations and their descendants may or may not also self-identify with the term. After the founding of the United States, black people continued to be enslaved, believed to be inferior to white people, they were treated as second-class citizens. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U. S. citizenship to whites only, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. The first African slaves arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony, the ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic, the settlers and the slaves who had not escaped returned to Haiti, whence they had come. The first recorded Africans in British North America were 20 and odd negroes who came to Jamestown, as English settlers died from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. Typically, young men or women would sign a contract of indenture in exchange for transportation to the New World, the landowner received 50 acres of land from the state for each servant purchased from a ships captain. An indentured servant would work for years without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery, servants could be bought, sold, or leased and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom and they raised families, married other Africans and sometimes intermarried with Native Americans or English settlers. By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards and purchased indentured servants of their own. In 1640, the Virginia General Court recorded the earliest documentation of slavery when they sentenced John Punch. One of Dutch African arrivals, Anthony Johnson, would own one of the first black slaves, John Casor
7.
Carol M. Highsmith
–
Carol M. Highsmith is an American photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed in all the states of the United States, as well as the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. She photographs the entire American vista in all 50 US states as a record of the early 21st Century, Highsmith is donating her lifes work of more than 100,000 images, royalty-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare, one-person archive. In 2013, Peatross told the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper, is not only taking photographs but creating a permanent record of the country and its people for the common good. On April 28,2013, the CBS television news magazine CBS This Morning featured Highsmiths work in a segment titled. CBS Correspondent Martha Teichner told in her report, Highsmith is at work on a project photographing all 50 states. Her pictures, thousands of them, are going to the Library of Congress and are being made free for anyone to use. The CBS Sunday Morning report continued, Highsmiths images also capture a disappearing America, Two weeks after she photographed Big Tex, the mascot of the Texas State Fair, he burned down. Her photograph of the New York skyline, just before 9/11, is also in the Library of Congress, CBS included more than 30 of Carols images in the online version of its report. In its December 2007 issue, the Library of Congresss Information Bulletin included a Conversation with Carol Highsmith, in the article, Jeremy Adamson, the director of Collections and Services at the library, said, Highsmiths color images are certainly of the highest technical and artistic quality. But more importantly, she has the ability to identify, focus on and capture for posterity the essential features of our social landscape and physical environment. A photograph by Carol Highsmith is a document of rare precision and beauty, revealing with exacting clarity the look and feel of people, Highsmith also photographed, and her publishing company, Chelsea Publishing, Inc. Early in her career, Highsmith photographed interior and exterior architecture and she photographed ordinary people and everyday sites as well as soaring architecture, natural landscapes, national parks and monuments, Civil War battlefields, and engineering marvels. In early 2002, Crescent Books published World Trade Center, Tribute and Remembrance, about the 2001 September 11 attacks in New York and she had taken aerial photographs of the Twin Towers two months before they fell. That same year, Highsmith and Landphair collaborated on Deep in the Heart and they also produced The Mount Washington, A Century of Grandeur, on the White Mountains resort. Highsmith collaborated with architectural writer Dixie Legler on Historic Bridges of Maryland, in 2007, Highsmith photographed, and author Ryan Coonerty described,52 monuments and other public sites in a National Geographic book Etched in Stone. Entitled California, it was published by Chelsea Publishing, Inc. and this archive, Carol M. Highsmiths America, Documenting the 21st Century, includes 1,000 images taken across the country. The collection emphasizes what Highsmith calls Disappearing America, including 200 shots taken along U. S. Route 66 in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. The more she travels across the country, the more convinced she is about the need to capture in photographs a rapidly changing America, the America I knew is disappearing at lightning speed, observed
8.
National Park Service
–
It was created on August 25,1916, by Congress through the National Park Service Organic Act and is an agency of the United States Department of the Interior. As of 2014, the NPS employs 21,651 employees who oversee 417 units, the National Park Service celebrated its centennial in 2016. National parks and national monuments in the United States were originally individually managed under the auspices of the Department of the Interior, the movement for an independent agency to oversee these federal lands was spearheaded by business magnate and conservationist Stephen Mather, as well as J. Horace McFarland. With the help of journalist Robert Sterling Yard, Mather ran a publicity campaign for the Department of the Interior and they wrote numerous articles that praised the scenic and historic qualities of the parks and their possibilities for educational, inspirational, and recreational benefits. This campaign resulted in the creation of a National Park Service, Mather became the first director of the newly formed NPS. On March 3,1933, President Herbert Hoover signed the Reorganization Act of 1933, the act would allow the President to reorganize the executive branch of the United States government. It wasnt until later that summer when the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Roosevelt agreed and issued two Executive orders to make it happen. In 1951, Conrad Wirth became director of the National Park Service, the demand for parks after the end of the World War II had left the parks overburdened with demands that could not be met. In 1952, with the support of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he began Mission 66, New parks were added to preserve unique resources and existing park facilities were upgraded and expanded. In 1966, as the Park Service turned 50 years old, emphasis began to turn from just saving great and wonderful scenery, Director George Hartzog began the process with the creation of the National Lakeshores and then National Recreation Areas. Since its inception in 1916, the National Park Service has managed each of the United States national parks, Yellowstone National Park was the first national park in the United States. In 1872, there was no government to manage it. Yosemite National Park began as a park, the land for the park was donated by the federal government to the state of California in 1864 for perpetual conservation. Yosemite was later returned to federal ownership, at first, each national park was managed independently, with varying degrees of success. In Yellowstone, the staff was replaced by the U. S. Army in 1886. Due to the irregularities in managing these national treasures, Stephen Mather petitioned the government to improve the situation. In response, Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane challenged him to lobby for creating a new agency, Mather was successful with the ratification of the National Park Service Organic Act in 1916. Later, the agency was given authority over other protected areas, the National Park System includes all properties managed by the National Park Service
9.
Emmett Till
–
Emmett Louis Till was an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14 after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, near Chicago, and was visiting relatives in Money, a small town in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryants husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went armed to Tills great-uncles house and they took him away and beat and mutilated him before fatally shooting him and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Tills body was discovered and retrieved from the river, Tills body was returned to Chicago. His mother, who had raised him, insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Tills bloated, mutilated body and her decision focused attention not only on American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy. S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of civil rights in Mississippi. In September 1955, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by a jury of Tills kidnapping. Protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam publicly admitted in an early 1956 interview with Look magazine that they had killed Till, problems identifying Till had affected the trial, possibly contributing to Bryants and Milams acquittals. In 2004 the case was reopened by the United States Department of Justice. As part of the investigation, the body was exhumed and autopsied and he was reburied in a new casket, which is the standard practice in cases of body exhumation. His original casket was donated to the Smithsonian Institution and it is displayed in the National Museum of African American History, the trial of Bryant and Milam attracted a vast amount of press attention. Tills murder is noted as a pivotal catalyst to the phase of the Civil Rights Movement. In December 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in Alabama and lasted more than a year, in a 2008 interview, first made public in 2017, Carolyn Bryant disclosed that she had fabricated her testimony that Till had made verbal or physical advances towards her. Events surrounding Emmett Tills life and death, according to historians, some writers have suggested that almost every story about Mississippi returns to Till, or the Delta region in which he died, in some spiritual, homing way. An Emmett Till Memorial Commission was established in the early 21st century, the Sumner County Courthouse was restored and includes the Emmett Till Interpretive Center
10.
Little Rock Nine
–
The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U. S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas,347 U. S.483, on May 17,1954. Tied to the 14th Amendment, the decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, after the decision, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. In Little Rock, the city of Arkansas, the Little Rock School Board agreed to comply with the high courts ruling. Virgil Blossom, the Superintendent of Schools, submitted a plan of gradual integration to the board on May 24,1955. The plan would be implemented during the fall of the 1957 school year, by 1957, the NAACP had registered nine black students to attend the previously all-white Little Rock Central High, selected on the criteria of excellent grades and attendance. Ernest Green was the first African American to graduate from Central High School, one of the plans created during attempts to desegregate the schools of Little Rock was by school superintendent Virgil Blossom. The initial approach proposed substantial integration beginning quickly and extending to all grades within a matter of many years and this original proposal was scrapped and replaced with one that more closely met a set of minimum standards worked out in attorney Richard B. This finalized plan would start in September 1957 and would integrate one high school, the second phase of the plan would take place in 1960 and would open up a few junior high schools to a few black children. The final stage would involve limited desegregation of the grade schools at an unspecified time. This plan was met with varied reactions from the NAACP branch of Little Rock, militant members like the Bateses opposed the plan on the grounds that it was vague, indefinite, slow-moving and indicative of an intent to stall further on public integration. This view was short lived, however, changes were made to the plan, the most detrimental being a new transfer system that would allow students to move out of the attendance zone to which they were assigned. The unaltered Blossom Plan had gerrymandered school districts to guarantee a black majority at Horace Mann High and a white majority at Hall High. This meant that, even though black students lived closer to Central, the altered plan gave white students the choice of not attending Horace Mann, but didnt give black students the option of attending Hall. This new Blossom Plan did not sit well with the NAACP and after failed negotiations with the school board and this lawsuit, along with a number of other factors contributed to the Little Rock School Crisis of 1957. Several segregationist councils threatened to hold protests at Central High and physically block the black students from entering the school, Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to support the segregationists on September 4,1957. The sight of a line of soldiers blocking out the students made national headlines, regarding the accompanying crowd, one of the nine students, Elizabeth Eckford, recalled, They moved closer and closer
11.
Greensboro sit-ins
–
While not the first sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement, the Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action, and also the most well-known sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement. These sit-ins led to increased national sentiment at a period in US history. The primary event took place at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth store, now the International Civil Rights Center, while the Greensboro sit-in was the most influential and significant sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement, it was not the first. In August 1939, black attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized a sit-in at the then-segregated Alexandria, Virginia, in 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored sit-ins in Chicago, as they did in St. Louis in 1949 and Baltimore in 1952. A1958 sit-in in Wichita, Kansas also was successful, days before the Woolworth sit-ins, the Greensboro Four were debating on which way would be the best to get the medias attention. They were Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. all were young black students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. They were inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his practice of non-violent protest, and wanted to change the segregational policies of Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina. The plan was simple, but effective, the four men would occupy seats at the local Woolworth, ask to be served, and they would repeat this process day in and day out, for as long as it would take. Their thinking was that, if they could attract attention to the issue. On February 1,1960, at 4, 30pm, the four sat down at the counter inside the Woolworth store at 132 South Elm Street in Greensboro. Following store policy, staff refused to serve the men at the whites only counter. However, the four freshmen stayed until the store closed that night, the next day, more than twenty black students, recruited from other campus groups, joined the sit-in. Students from Bennett College, a college for women in Greensboro. White customers heckled the black students, who read books and studied to keep busy, newspaper reporters and a TV videographer covered the second day, and others in the community learned of the protests. On the third day, more than 60 people came to the Woolworth store, a statement issued by Woolworth national headquarters said that the company would abide by local custom and maintain its segregation policy. On the fourth day, more than 300 people took part, organizers agreed to expand the sit-in protests to include the lunch counter at Greensboros Kress store. As early as one week after the Greensboro sit-ins began, students in other North Carolina towns launched their own, winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh, Charlotte, and out-of-state towns such as Lexington, Kentucky all saw protests. Most of these protests were peaceful, but there were instances of violence, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, tensions rose between blacks and whites and fights broke out
Media related to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church at Wikimedia Commons
