Word: sitdowns
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...over the South. Negro students were on the march last week in a widespread, nonviolent protest the likes of which the U.S. had never seen. In the eleven weeks since four young Negro college students staged the first sitdown demonstration against segregation at the lunch counter of a Woolworth five-and-dime store in Greensboro, N.C. (TIME, Feb. 22 et seq.), the lunch-counter movement had spread through the moderate border states and the diehard Deep South like a dry-summer forest fire in a stiff breeze...
...Street and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. The white patrons eyed them warily, and the white waitresses ignored their studiously polite requests for service. The students continued to sit until closing time. Next morning they reappeared, reinforced by 25 fellow students. By last week their unique sitdown had spread through 14 cities in five Southern states in a far-ranging attack on the Jim Crow custom that Negroes may be served while standing at downtown lunch counters but may not be served if they sit down...
Inevitably, the sitdowns washed up some familiar flotsam: the duck-tailed, sideburned swaggerers, the rednecked hatemongers, the Ku Klux Klan. Stores in Durham, Greensboro and Rock Hill, S.C. were closed after getting anonymous telephoned bomb threats. Just as inevitably, the national pressure groups arrived on the scene and helped organize the sitdowns in other Southern cities. Five days after the Greensboro sitdown began, a representative of the Congress of Racial Equality turned up in Greensboro and Durham, announced that CORE was taking over, and advised the sitters to concentrate on just one chain-Woolworth...
Afraid that they were being eased out of their jobs in a played-out lignite mine near Spoleto, 90 miners went on a sitdown strike 1,300 ft. underground. They got friends to send down bedding. Officials of their Communist-run union organized relays to send down food and wine. The strikers played cards, chatted or took long walks in the eerily echoing galleries...
...dank and dark a sitdown strike as even militant or desperate men could survive, and soon about one-third of the strikers, worried about their families or tired of living like moles, got out by emergency exits. Wives and children of the remaining strikers gathered at the pithead to talk by phone to their men below on Mine Level 13. Spoleto's Archbishop Raffaele Mario Radossi, using the same phone, implored the strikers to surface and negotiate. Worried company officials struggled to keep the pumps operating and the ventilating system working so that the men would not fall victim...