CORE Leads Early Sit-in in Chicago
The newly founded Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded on March 9, 1942, organized a sit-in on this day at the racially segregated Jack Spratt Restaurant in Chicago.
The event may have been the first sit-in in the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
Similar sit-ins during the 1940s also occurred in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 1943, and April 22, 1944. The 1943 sit-ins preceded the famous sit-ins that began February 1, 1960, by 17 years. CORE was established as an offshoot of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist group founded on November 11, 1915.
The April 17, 1943 sit-in included Pauli Murray, an important but often neglected pioneer in the civil rights movement, and also and important feminist in the 1960s.
CORE is most famous for leading the 1961 Freedom Ride, one of the iconic events of the Civil Rights Movement, which began on May 4, 1961.
Read the history of CORE: August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Core: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement (1973)
Watch a 1965 interview with CORE leader James Farmer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXVcUZZQZRA
Read the definitive new biography of Pauli Murray: Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow The Life of Pauli Murray (2017)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here