Sit-ins Integrate Baltimore Lunch Counters at Read’s Stores
On this day, African-Americans staged a sit-in and within hours successfully integrated the lunch counters at Read’s Department Store in Baltimore, Maryland.
Contrary to popular belief, the sit-ins as a civil rights tactic did not begin on February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina. There had been a few sit-ins in the 1940s (Washington, April 17, 1943; Chicago, May 8, 1943; Washington, April 22, 1944), and a few in the late 1950s, including the one that started on this day. Others occurred in Wichita on July 19, 1958, and Oklahoma on August 19, 1958. T
he crucial difference between the pre-1960 sit-ins and the famous February 1, 1960 sit-in was that the earlier sit-ins did not inspire a massive sit-in movement, which the justly famous 1960 sit-in did.
Read the story about the Baltimore Sit-ins: http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis55.htm#1955balt
Learn more: Iwan W. Morgan and Philip Davies, From Sit-ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (2012)
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