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The birth of the sit-in

One day in May 1942, a group of young Chicagoans — black and white — opened a key chapter in civil rights history by refusing to take no for an answer when told that Jack Spratt Coffee House on East 47th Street didn’t serve African-Americans. At the time, the world took little notice. “If we were lucky, there might be a small paragraph on a back page of the Chicago Tribune saying, in effect, that a few nuts and crackpots sat in a restaurant until they were served, or thrown out, or the place closed — whichever came first,” James Farmer recalled in his 1985 memoir, “Lay Bare the Heart.”

Farmer was an organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation with a hunch that the organization’s pacifist commitment to turning a cheek in the face of violence could be a weapon with which to combat segregation. The U.S. said it was fighting World War II to save democracy abroad, even as African-Americans were denied equal rights at home by Southern laws and Northern customs.

To test his idea, Farmer and 27 others, many of whom lived around the University of Chicago campus, went to the nearby restaurant, known to be unfriendly to African-Americans. As expected, whites were served, and blacks were not. All rejected the management’s proposal that they dine in the basement. The police refused to remove Farmer and his friends, saying they hadn’t broken any Illinois laws. Jack Spratt afterward quietly dropped its anti-black policies.

Eighteen years later a group of college students struggling to desegregate a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., sought advice from the Congress of Racial Equality, which was born during the civil rights campaign on 47th Street. In the South in 1960, police and whites were hardly the nonpartisan bystanders their Chicago counterparts had been. Food was dumped on protesters, who were also beaten and arrested.

But the students persevered, and their tactic quickly spread to other cities. In August, student leaders came to Chicago to explain their motivation to an audience at the Corpus Christi Center in the South Side ghetto.

“Down there you felt all alone,” said Ezell Blair, who participated in one of the first Greensboro sit-ins. “You feel very timid. But it is just about the time that you think you are going to break that you say to yourself, ‘No, I’ll stay right here.'”

Between the time of the Chicago sit-in and the one in Greensboro, blacks won a milestone victory with 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that separate schools for whites and blacks were unconstitutional. But with many states stalling on actually desegregating, blacks were frustrated with the lawsuit route to equality. Farmer and his Chicago friends had come to that conclusion long before.

Along with their campaign to desegregate restaurants, CORE members in 1949 confronted White City Roller Skating Rink, a remnant of the famous 63rd Street amusement park, which was off-limits to blacks. After being repeatedly turned away — always with the explanation that there was a private party — Farmer filed complaints against several employees. But at the trial, an assistant state’s attorney went into the tank, faster than a stumblebum boxer. In summation, he said: “We have failed to prove that they discriminated, and as prosecutor for the state, I can make but one recommendation, namely that you find these defendants from the White City Roller Skating Rink, not guilty.” The judge reluctantly complied.

In the aftermath of the North Carolina sit-ins, CORE’s Chicago experience and the eagerness of Southern students to combat Jim Crow came together with the civil rights movement’s adoption of Farmer’s brainchild: nonviolent resistance. The tactic gained a national audience during the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott thanks to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “No longer did we have to explain nonviolence to people,” Farmer said. “Thanks to Martin Luther King, it was a household word.”

In 1961, CORE, with Farmer as its director, sent Freedom Riders to integrate buses in Dixie. Again, there was violence and arrests. Attorney General Robert Kennedy wanted the Freedom Rides halted. The Tribune — as it often did during this time period — attributed the demand for change to subversives with a headline “Freedom Rides Traced To Red Inspired Plot.” But it also reported how volunteers from Illinois were screened according to protocol set during the early Chicago sit-ins. “We look for persons who sincerely want to improve race relations — persons who want to abide by dictates of passive resistance rather than those who want to fight back,” a CORE recruiter told a Trib reporter.

A federal judge in Alabama ordered the Freedom Rides and attendant violence to stop. “If there are any more occurrences of this sort of thing, I am going to put some Klansmen, city officials, policemen, and Negro preachers in the penitentiary,” the judge said, according to the Trib’s account. Yet the Freedom Riders kept coming, and in September the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered an end to segregated transportation.

In the years that followed, Farmer split with CORE, which had tilted toward black separatism and militant philosophy incompatible with Farmer’s pacifism. “Blacks and whites have contributed too much to CORE for it to degenerate like this,” he told the Tribune in 1978.

He briefly joined the Nixon administration in 1969, but Farmer — who with King, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph and John Lewis was considered a major force in the civil rights movement — had been largely forgotten when President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, a year before he died.

He left a bittersweet evaluation of the faith that inspired that sit-in on 47th Street.

“We too, in the early years of CORE, believed that truth alone, the transparent justice of our demands, would convert the segregationists,” he wrote in 1965 in “Freedom — When?” “We were very young and idealistic.”

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