Civil Rights “Jail-in” in Rock Hill, South Carolina
On this day, civil rights demonstrators in Rock Hill, South Carolina, who were arrested for organizing and participating in sit-ins, began a “jail-in” by refusing to post bail, with the intention of filling the local jail.
The Rock Hill sit-ins had begun a year earlier, in February 1960, as part of the first wave of national sit-ins, that had begun on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Demonstrators were arrested in January 1961, convicted, and sentenced to jail. On this day, they began serving their sentences of “hard labor” at the York County Prison Farm.
There had been a small number of sit-in in the 1940s and 1950s, prior to the massive sit-in movement sparked by the February 1, 1960 sit it. The first sit-in (that we know about) occurred in Washington, DC on April 17, 1943, and was led by Howard University students seeking to desegregated a restaurant. A month later, the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.) led a sit-in at a restaurant in Chicago on May 8, 1943. Howard University student led a second Washington, DC sit-in on April 22, 1944. And on January 20, 1955 sit-ins in Baltimore desegregated local lunch counters.
Learn more about SNCC: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
Learn more about the Rock Hill struggle: http://www.crmvet.org/info/rockhill.htm
Hear the music of the Civil Rights Movement (18 songs): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFc8glsWjgU&list=PLYwfZ_bASjn25XLL6KrVH6F4d8TqlTBog
More about the civil rights struggle in Rock Hill: http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/rock-hill-south-carolina-students-sit-us-civil-rights-1960
The “Sixties” really began in the mid-1950s and ended in the early 1970s. Read: Christopher B. Strain, The Long Sixties: America, 1955-1973 (2016)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here