Sit-in Challenges Restaurant Segregation in Washington, D.C.
The sit-in on this day, challenging racial discrimination at Thompson’s Restaurant in Washington, D.C., was a follow-up to a sit-in by Howard University students on April 17, 1943, the first known racial sit-in in American history.
A month after the 1943 sit-in in Washington, the civil rights group C.O.R.E. led a sit-in in Chicago on May 8, 1943. These sit-ins were signs of rising demands for racial justice during the World War II years. They have been largely forgotten today, overshadowed by the famous sit-ins that began February 1, 1960.
The sit-ins were eventually quashed by Southerners in Congress who had power of the budget for Washington, D.C. and Howard University.
One participant in this sit-in was Pauli Murray, who went on to a distinguished career as a lawyer, feminist, poet, and civil libertarian. Murray wrote an important memorandum for President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, arguing that the Equal Protection Clause of he Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equality for women (October 11, 1963; July 1, 1985).
Other pre-1960 sit-ins occured on August 11, 1958; August 19, 1958. Thompson’s Restaurant was finally desegregated on June 8, 1953, in a case that reached the Supreme Court.
Take the civil rights history tour of Washington, D.C.: http://washington.org/dc-itinerary/dc-itinerary-major-civil-rights-sites-1-day
Read the definitive new biography: Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow The Life of Pauli Murray (2017)
Learn more about Pauli Murray: Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes (1956)
Read: Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2016)
And more at the Pauli Murray Project: http://paulimurrayproject.org/
Learn more about the 1960s sit-ins: Iwan W. Morgan and Philip Davies, From Sit-ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (2012)