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In its conclusion, the book returns to where it began, with the story of the four students in Greensboro in February 1960 and the remarkable cascade of events their protest set in motion. Key to understanding how all this happened—how an isolated act of protest turned into a social movement and how this social movement set off a constitutional debate that would transform the nation—requires an appreciation to the distinctive legal issues surrounding the sit-ins. The story of the sit-ins offers a powerful case study of the complex and often unpredictable process of constitutional change in modern America. For each generation of Americans, the challenge is to find new ways to combine social protest and legal claims to disrupt those practices and policies that perpetuate old inequalities and create new ones. The lunch counter sit-in movement shows that it can be done.

Chapter 5 traces the tactics of anti-abortion activists and their impact on the experience of abortion providers and patients. Already in the 1970s, towns tried to prevent the opening of abortion clinics through building and zoning regulations. Once clinics had opened, demonstrators in front of abortion clinics, intimidated patients and abortion providers, held prayer vigils and harassed patients and staff through sidewalk counselling. The chapter discusses the history and tactics of sidewalk counselling and Crisis Pregnancy Centers and the attempts of abortion providers to defend themselves against anti-abortion activism. Providers’ ability to endure the harassment and continue their work depended in part on their ability to get help from law enforcement. And African American patients and providers also relied on their experiences as civil rights activists when confronting anti-abortion activists. The chapter focuses on the experiences of clinics in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Fargo, North Dakota, and concludes with a discussion of Operation Rescue tactics in Atlanta and Detroit.

Through carefully scripted and publicized acts of civil disobedience which were staged as a form of political theater, the protest movement finally succeeded in bringing down the Jim Crow signs. This chapter explores activism and photography in the movie theater of the sit-ins, focusing on the daily confrontations between the white waitresses who instantiated and enforced the color line and the African American students who persisted in challenging it. The standoff was a compelling subject for photojournalists, who sacrificed norms of journalistic objectivity to stand behind the students, literally and figuratively, challenging the social gaze that was funneled through the waitress with the partisan perspective of their cameras. This perspective was not monolithic, however, and diverse visions of the struggle's goals and consequences were rendered through the differential treatment of the male and female protesters. These gendered pictures try out alternative visions of desegregation: one emphasized color blindness, the other the recognition and revaluation of difference.

The alternative black press grew in popularity and editorial stridency in the 1960s, prompting commercial publishers to try to steer the Black Power Movement into acceptable political channels. Alternative publications included student newspapers, leftist political journals, and organizational newspapers for Black Nationalist groups. TheBlack Panther and Muhammad Speaks claimed circulations that rivaled the largest commercial newspapers. Alternative editors questioned the value of integration, endorsed armed self-defense, and embraced a Marxist critique of American capitalism and empire. Commercial publishers attempted to advise young sit-in protesters and then tried to define Black Power as the effective use of political power. By the late 1960s, though, they almost universally condemned the Black Panther Party and other militant activists, fearing unneeded provocations would erase significant legislative achievements.

Federal judges facing the avalanche of civil rights cases came to a variety of decisions. Some pressed for immediate progress. Others were willing to countenance delay. The circuit courts of appeals bench was more consistent and insistent on compliance, led by Elbert Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom, and Richard T. Rives, but in the localities, desegregation went slowly. Cases involving James Meredith in Mississippi showed how judges like Sidney Mize could bring the civil rights litigation to a halt. In collateral attacks on Jim Crow, the desegregation of lunch counters, city buses, and other public facilities showed that community action by men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and women like Rosa Parks could aid litigation and litigation could protect community action. Southern defiance could not stop Congress from passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This chapter explores the national resurgence of the Congress of Racial Equality, which coincided with the student-led sit-in movement during the early half of 1960. Specifically, this chapter shows how a CORE chapter emerged in Brooklyn, New York and it tells of the local people, some who were moderates, and some who were former Communists, who emerged as the chapter’s leaders.

This chapter highlights Brooklyn CORE’s campaign to open up jobs for black workers at the Ebinger Baking Corporation. After a borough-wide boycott and weeks of picketing, a dramatic sit-down strike at the company’s main delivery depot finally brought corporate leaders to the negotiating table. Ebinger leaders agreed to a compensatory hiring plan that gave preference to black job applicants.

The second chapter follows seven students across Mississippi as they came of age and observed iterations of the national civil rights movement as they materialized in their hometowns. Students studied and discussed the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and other protests that occurred in their home communities while they were growing up, which constituted a form of education that served as an important precursor to the Freedom Schools.

This chapter by John Kirk explores the convoluted responses by state and federal courts to trespassing charges brought against Little Rock students protesting lunch counter segregation and the complicated jurisprudential tensions between civil rights and property rights. While sympathetic to the aims of the sit-ins, the U.S. Supreme Court proved consistently reluctant to rule in their favor over the rights of property owners. It eventually overturned the convictions of the Arkansas students (and over three thousand other sit-in cases) on the basis of the outlawing of public segregation by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, its failure to clearly delineate the role of the state in adjudicating between individual liberties and private property rights had implications that remain unresolved a half-century later.

This chapter by George Lewis analyses a vital but hitherto neglected aspect of the sit-in movement–its impact on white segregationists. It shows how the student protests posed an array of fundamental challenges to the central tenets of Jim Crow ideology. The sit-ins thereby undermined some fundamental assumptions of the segregationist credo, notably its conviction that African Americans were content with the regional caste system, and thus created divisions among Southern resisters about how to combat them. As a result the sit-ins altered the fundamental balance of power in the freedom struggle, not only through their reinvigoration of nonviolent protest but also by wresting the tactical and intellectual initiative from those seeking to preserve segregation.

This chapter by Clive Webb continues the exploration of the impact that the student sit-ins had on segregationists. It acknowledges the importance of the protests in demonstrating to white defenders of Jim Crow the depth of black anger with this system and the consequent segregationist resort to defense of property rights rather than racist doctrine to legitimize their continued resistance to racial change. It also moves beyond monolithic interpretations of Southern white reaction to show that this spanned the entire spectrum from confrontation to cooperation. It also considers some neglected influences on white response to the protests--notably international politics and Christian theology--and examines how segregationist politicians in the U.S. Congress incorporated a critique of the sit-ins into their opposition to enactment of federal civil rights legislation.

This chapter by Simon Hall examines another element of SNCC's intellectual transformation. While segregationists routinely denounced the outburst of student sit-in protest in 1960 as the work of communists, civil rights activists were assiduous in linking their demonstrations to the international struggle between the free world and the forces of totalitarian ideology. This chapter traces the use of Cold War patriotism by early student protestors and SNCC and its eventual replacement with a more critical internationalism that emphasized global solidarity among non-white peoples and condemned U.S. foreign policy as racist, expansionist, and imperialistic. It concludes, however, that the new ascendancy of this perspective, which had always been present within SNCC, had a damaging effect on the organization's capacity to attract wider public and political support.

Further examining global aspects of the freedom struggle, this chapter by Stephen Tuck argues that the local/national struggles for racial equality in America and Britain can only be fully understood in their international context. The relationship between civil rights activists in both countries was particularly close in the 1960s and triangulated with developments in Africa and the Caribbean. The sit-ins became a favored tactic of British anti-racist activism, but never won big headlines because Jim Crow-style segregation was not deeply embedded in the U.K. Meanwhile American campaigners for racial equality followed events in Britain, which were more analogous than postcolonial Africa's to their own situation. In providing a cautionary tale of the socioeconomic discrimination and anti-immigration sentiment that a black minority experienced in a liberal democracy, U.K. developments helped to inform SNCC's eventual call for Black Power as its official position.

The book begins with the four African American college students who, on February 1, 1960, sat down at the “whites only” lunch counter of the Greensboro Woolworth store and asked to be served. Their actions set in motion a remarkable chain of events that inspired thousands of black students to join a lunch counter sit-in movement that exploded across the South in the following weeks and months. The Sit-ins draws attention to legal issues that other scholars have too often overlooked. A full account of the sit-in movement requires a recognition of the ways that ordinary citizens with little knowledge or interest in the intricacies of constitutional doctrine were nonetheless moved by their assumptions about what the law required, what it allowed, and what it prohibited. It also requires attention to the nuances of equal protection doctrine as it stood in the early 1960s, for this was the terrain on which lawyers and judges struggled to make sense of the students’ defiant challenge to the racial status quo. The sit-in protests offer a rich case study to examine the ways in which constitutional claims took shape and were transformed as they moved into and through the legal system.

This chapter centers on the African American students who took part in the lunch counter sit-in movement in the winter and spring of 1960. It explores the distinctive vision of civil rights around which this new generation of activists mobilized. The students saw the sit-ins as an effort to break away from the litigation and lobbying tactics that defined traditional civil rights activity at the time. They targeted a realm of racial discrimination—privately owned public accommodations—that, for reasons of strategy and law, established organizations had largely avoided. Their protest-centered approach could produce immediate, tangible results, which was a critical ingredient for movement mobilization. The students even discovered value in punishment. When thrown in jail on charges of trespass or disorderly conduct, many refused bail; when convicted they often chose to serve a jail sentence rather than pay a fine. The students transformed the legal system from a tool of redress to a platform to amplify their claim that racial discrimination in this realm of life was an affront to human dignity and a violation of their most basic rights as citizens.

This chapter explains why the lunch counter sit-in movement gained such substantial support from varied sources and considers the different ways this support was expressed. White college students in the North organized sympathy protests; religious and civic groups issued statements praising the movement; President Eisenhower as well as both major party candidates in the 1960 presidential contest indicated support for the students’ cause. This chapter also shows the key role that outside sympathizers played in transforming the legal significance of the sit-ins. Sympathizers translated the students’ bold claims for dignity and equality into the language of “popular constitutionalism”—the rich blend of legal norms, moral sensibilities, and public policy with which the American people contest, and sometimes remake, the meaning of the Constitution. By considering how an eclectic cast of characters, from national political leaders to ordinary citizens, understood the sit-ins, this chapter charts how an aspirational constitutional claim—a claim, that is, without solid footing as a matter of court-defined constitutional law—took shape in the crucible of public discourse. The sit-ins show how public expectations about the Constitution can be shaped not only by signals from authoritative constitutional interpreters but also by transformative acts of social protest.

This chapter examines those who opposed the sit-in movement. Following recent trends in the historiography of modern American conservatism, one of the chapter’s goals is to demonstrate the diversity of interests and tactics contained within a group that too often has been lumped into the monolithic category of “segregationists.” Divisions among southern whites were particularly consequential in the sit-in movement because of the distinctive legal issues involved. Many lunch counter operators felt caught in a battle they did not want to fight. Local officials often tried to stay above the fray, while state-level political leaders regularly urged crackdowns on the protests. These divisions ultimately benefited the movement. The legal factor that made the constitutional claim of the sit-in protesters such a challenge to existing equal protection doctrine in the courts—the fact that these were private businesses—also made mobilizing in opposition to the sit-ins much more difficult. Meanwhile, segregationist ideologues launched a constitutional counter-offensive, proclaiming that private business operators had a legally protected “right to discriminate.” Although opponents lost more than they won in the battle over racial discrimination at lunch counters, their constitutional vision helped shape its outcome.