“The Negroes Are Here!” First-Ever Sit-in in Alabama
Twenty-nine African American students from Alabama State College on this morning walked into the all-white snack room in the Montgomery County Courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama in the morning of this day in the first known sit-in in Alabama. One startled white patron exclaimed “The Negroes Are Here!”
Indeed they were. The sit-in movement had begun just three weeks earlier, on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. That challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations sparked sit-ins all across the south. On this day the movement finally reached Alabama. The students refused to leave, and snack room staff turned off the lights. A few minutes later the police arrived but made no arrests or attempts to forcibly remove the students. After about an hour, the students left.
The Alabama Governor John M. Patterson ordered that the nine students believed to be the leaders of the event be expelled from Alabama State College. The other twenty were reprimanded.
Fifty-eight years later, in a quiet action on May 10, 2018 the Alabama Board of Education issued a formal apology to the nine expelled students and cleared their official records on the original expulsion.
James McFadden, one of the expelled students, soon joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, and referred to as Snick”), which had been formed out of the original sit-ins on April 15, 1960, and went on to become the most assertive civil rights movement in the south.
View the early sit-ins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbbcjn4d1cE
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)
Learn more about SNCC: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
Read an original 1960 listing of the first sit-ins, 2/1/60 – 3/31/60: http://www.crmvet.org/docs/6004_sitin-list.pdf
Learn About the Southern Civil Rights Movement – Photos and Documents: http://crmvet.org/
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here