The Capitol Street Boycott

By the fall of nineteen sixty-two, Medgar Evers had been building the Jackson movement for eight years. He had organized chapters, investigated crimes, registered voters, and gotten people killed for doing it. He had tried and failed to force change through legal channels. He decided to try economic pressure.

The target was Capitol Street, the main commercial strip in downtown Jackson, where the department stores and five-and-dimes and specialty shops did the bulk of their business. Black Jacksonians were among their customers. The stores took their money and then declined to give them equal service, put up separate restrooms and water fountains, refused to hire Black employees in visible positions, and did not use courtesy titles when addressing Black customers.

Evers, working with Tougaloo sociology professor John Salter and the NAACP Youth Councils at colleges and high schools across the city, organized a boycott of Capitol Street businesses beginning in November nineteen sixty-two. The message was straightforward: Black dollars would not return to stores that did not treat Black customers as equal. They distributed leaflets. They organized committees. They maintained the pressure through the holiday shopping season and into nineteen sixty-three.

By the estimates of participants, sixty-five to ninety percent of Black Jacksonians participated. The business owners were losing money. They were also not desegregating. The boycott was effective economically and ineffective politically. So the movement escalated to direct action, which is what produced the Woolworth's sit-in on May twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-three, and the demonstrations that followed.

Medgar Evers was murdered on June twelfth, nineteen sixty-three, two weeks after Woolworth's. The movement did not stop. The city did not immediately desegregate. But the evidence is in the sequence: Jackson is different now than it was in nineteen sixty-two, and the boycott was part of what made that difference.