The Lunch Counters of Nineteen Sixty-Two

In nineteen sixty-two, Huntsville was a city with two parallel economies. The aerospace economy around Redstone Arsenal and the new Marshall Space Flight Center employed thousands of federal workers and engineers, many of them from outside the South. The city they worked in was still legally segregated, with separate lunch counters, restrooms, schools, and public spaces for Black and white residents.

That spring, students from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, the historically Black university north of the city founded in eighteen seventy-five, began holding sit-ins at downtown lunch counters. When the mayor declined to respond to their demands, a broader organization called the Community Service Committee formed to coordinate additional protests and provide bail for those arrested. By April, the city had established a committee to address the concerns the students had raised.

On May eleventh, nineteen sixty-two, eight lunch counters in downtown Huntsville were desegregated, along with various other public spaces. Huntsville became the first city in Alabama to achieve racial integration of public accommodations. The decision came without the violence that had met similar efforts in Birmingham and other Alabama cities. It came without a federal court order. It came because the students had sat down and refused to leave.

It was not a complete victory. School desegregation took longer, required a court ruling, and in the fall of nineteen sixty-three brought George Wallace's state troopers to the schoolhouse steps before a federal restraining order made them stand down. But the spring of nineteen sixty-two established something: this city, which had built the rocket that launched the first American satellite, had maintained legal segregation throughout. The students who changed that were from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical, not from NASA.