State College’s Response to the Greensboro Sit-ins

Contributed by Samantha Rich

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, NC and politely asked for service. After employees refused to meet their requests, they remained in their seats. Their passive resistance ignited a student-led movement across the South challenging racial inequalities.

While articles describing the events of that February day appeared in newspapers across the state, NC State College’s Technician remained silent on the protest and subsequent sit-ins until March 10, when it picked up a story describing the arrest of student protesters in Nashville, TN. This total lack of discussion may have stemmed from the poor integration policies at NC State during this time; NC State had begun admitting African American students to its undergraduate programs only four years earlier (1956). Irwin Holmes , one of the first four African American students enrolled at State, would graduate from the electrical engineering program later that year.

Campus silence broke again on March 21, following the annual North Carolina Student Legislative Assembly meeting at the state Capitol days earlier. In an article entitled “Student Legislature Passes Lunch Counter Legislation,” the Technician reported that students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A&T), a historically black college, proposed legislation that declared “all establishments offering service to the general public be hereafter and forever forbidden to refuse service to anyone on a basis of creed, color, or ethnic origin.” The bill passed 51 to 17, however the article noted, “It might be pointed out at this point that about half of the assembly was made up of Negro students.” While this suggests that the author believed the bill would not have passed had African American students not been present, the actions of the State College Student Government that followed indicated that students at A&T presented a persuasive argument in support of the bill and anti-discrimination laws.

Two-weeks after the Student Legislative Assembly, State College Student Government passed a Civil Rights Declaration that stated that North Carolina businesses should not refuse to serve any member of the public based on their appearance. It is important to note, however, that NC State student legislators utilized the word “appearance” not “race” or “color” within the declaration. Further, Student Government declared that the bill reflected “no particular concern for the rights of any race or minority group,” only “each and every citizen of the State of North Carolina in general.” This emphasis on vocabulary may have been meant to ease the minds of more conservative senators who would not discuss discrimination in terms of race. The bill went on to state that any discrimination based on appearance could “[set] the precedent that [placed] the rights of every other citizen in jeopardy.”

It would be three years before Hillsborough Street businesses integrated and more than ten years before NC State began implementing serious integration and African American recruitment programs . However, the discourse surrounding anti-discrimination laws during the sit-in movement did prompt a previously silent campus to develop a response to contemporary segregation practices.

To learn more about African American history at NC State, please visit Historical State or check out the Red, White & Black mobile walking tour.

Sources: Technician (10 March 1960, 21 March 1960, 11 April 1960); Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “Sitting for Justice: Woolworth’s Lunch Counter,” Separate is not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education , available from http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/6-legacy/freedom-struggle-2.html , accessed 17 February 2012; “Media/Headlines,” Greensboro Sit-ins: Launch of a Civil Rights Movement , available from http://www.sitins.com/media_hl.shtml , accessed 17 February 2012.