Sit-in Arrestees Refuse Bail in Georgia, Choose “Jail-In”
African-American students arrested for conducting sit-ins a segregated lunch counters in Atlanta refused bail and chose instead to remain in jail as part of a “jail-in,” designed to dramatize both segregation and their arrests.
The recent arrests brought the number of of “jail-in” participants to seventy in the Fulton County (Atlanta) prison. Meanwhile, thirteen sit-in activists remained in jail in York County, South Carolina (see February 2, 1961), after being arrested for sit-ins in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The leader of the Atlanta sit-ins, Hershelle Sullivan, explained that she hoped the “jail-in” would bring about intervention by President Kennedy to end segregation in the south.
The sit-in movement began on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, was formed by sit-in leaders at a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, on April 15, 1960.
Read: Dick Cluster, ed., They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee (1979)
Learn more: Iwan W. Morgan and Philip Davies, From Sit-ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (2012)
Read more about SNCC: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
Learn About the Southern Civil Rights Movement – Photos and Documents: http://crmvet.org/
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