In the decades following the defeat of Reconstruction (1877), and the effective end of black suffrage (by amendment to the North Carolina Constitution in 1900), the introduction of Jim Crow (segregation) laws was seen as “essential for social stability and … economic prosperity.” The suppression of blacks guaranteed low wages for both blacks and many less-skilled whites. In 1953 North Carolina had even passed an “anti-masking” law, after which the klan 1 marched robed but with faces uncovered. Local governments in those three cities plus Raleigh (the capital), High Point, and Salisbury had by then created biracial “race relations” committees, which in most cases led to negotiations, considerable stalling, but finally desegregation of local stores.ĭavid Cunningham, a sociologist at Brandeis University, tells us that North Carolina was “a state widely perceived as a bastion of Southern liberalism.” It had elected two governors, Terry Sanford in 1960 and Dan Moore in 1964, considered moderate: although officially opposed to integration (essential to election in a state where the voter registration rate of blacks was half that of whites), they were not part of the massive resistance to school integration and later to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts we associate with such governors as George Wallace of Alabama or Ross Barnett of Mississippi. After many arrests, and assaults by white hoodlums, on July 25 all Greensboro stores targeted by the sit-ins agreed to serve blacks on an equal basis. Eleven of the first sit-ins were within 100 miles of Greensboro.

Within a week the sit-ins spread to Durham and Winston-Salem. Blacks had traditionally not been served there or anywhere in the South at that time.

Sit-ins at lunch counters by black students began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960.

Klansville, U.S.A. by David Cunningham