Long-ignored early sit-ins recognized at civil rights convention
The often overlooked demonstrators, all former NAACP youth members, were being recognized Wednesday — nearly 50 years later — at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
"The sit-in movement was really started by NAACP youth chapters," said Ronald Walters, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland who led the 1958 Wichita sit-in and will be honored Wednesday. "They've never acknowledged us, but now it looks as though they will."
The ceremony is scheduled for the fifth day of the NAACP's 97th annual meeting, which is being attended by more than 4,000 and runs through Thursday. Also Wednesday, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, are to make remarks. Thursday, President Bush is scheduled to speak, his first visit to the civil rights group since becoming president.
The recognition for the first sit-ins was sparked when current NAACP youth members researched the history of the NAACP Youth and College Division, which is marking its 70th year, said Stefanie Brown, youth and college director.
"We were uncovering the examples of the way our division contributed to national civil rights, and some of the outstanding examples were in Wichita and Oklahoma City," Brown said. In social movements, "it's oftentimes been young people who have been those foot soldiers who've gone out to do some of the hardest work. But they were not getting the credit they deserved."
Sit-ins involved blacks who protested local racial segregation laws by banding together to demand service, often at whites-only lunch counters. They refused to leave until they were served. Though they faced threats, arrests and often violent backlash, they energized desegregation efforts nationwide.
The first known sit-in was a three-week protest in Wichita in August, 1958, said Gretchen Eick, a historian at Friends University in Wichita. Oklahoma City soon followed, but neither got national media attention, she said.
Youth sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., in February, 1960, garnered heavy media attention, sparked similar protests in more than 50 other cities and became widely but mistakenly regarded as the first of their kind, Eick said.
"People who didn't live through that era think of the movement only as a southern movement, but it was not," said Eick, who wrote "Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72."
Some NAACP members quietly grumbled when national officials prepared to honor sit-ins that predated Greensboro. But in his keynote speech to the convention, NAACP board chairman Julian Bond confirmed that the Greensboro youths took their cues from the earlier demonstrations.
"Any history record of the civil rights movement you pick up, any book goes back to 1960 and Greensboro," said Rev. Amos Brown, a current NAACP board member who helped plan the Oklahoma City and Wichita actions. "I've called a lot of editors and told them the truth, and they say, 'Oh, we didn't know.'"