Sit-Ins
Civil Rights Movement
"I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect." Martin Luther King, Jr. 1958
Sit-ins as protest
Sit-ins are a form of protest in which people peacefully sit in a certain place in an effort to have their issue noticed and changed. On February 1, 1960, four young African American college students walked into the Woolworth Company, sat down at a whites-only lunch counter and triggered the civil rights movement that spread across the nation. Although they were not arrested as they expected, they launched a series of sit-ins across the nation. Blacks and whites began to sit in to demand equal rights and service for African-Americans.