Woolworth's, May 28, 1963

The Capitol Street Woolworth's was part of a national chain. It had a lunch counter. Black Jacksonians were not permitted to sit at it.

By the spring of nineteen sixty-three, Medgar Evers and Tougaloo sociology professor John Salter had been building toward this moment for months. They had organized an economic boycott of Capitol Street businesses the previous fall, and sixty-five to ninety percent of Black Jacksonians had participated. The boycott had not produced desegregation. So on May twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-three, they escalated.

Four people sat down at the lunch counter that morning. Pearlena Lewis was a Tougaloo student who had been organizing with Evers for months. Anne Moody was a Tougaloo student from Centreville, Mississippi, who had been involved in the movement since high school. Joan Trumpauer was a white student from Washington D.C. who had transferred to Tougaloo specifically to participate in the movement. Memphis Norman was a Tougaloo student from Hattiesburg. John Salter joined them shortly after.

They sat quietly and asked to be served. They were not served. Over the next three hours, a white mob formed inside the restaurant and attacked them. Memphis Norman was thrown from his stool and kicked in the head as he lay on the floor. Ketchup, mustard, and sugar were poured on the protesters. Cigarettes were pressed against their skin. Salt and pepper were thrown in their faces. The protesters held their positions and did not respond with violence.

A photographer from the Jackson Daily News, Fred Blackwell, took a photograph that afternoon that captured the scene at the counter. The photograph ran in newspapers across the country. It showed the attackers and the protesters with equal clarity, and what it showed required no editorial explanation.

Anne Moody later wrote about that day and about her Jackson years in her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, published in nineteen sixty-eight. The book remains one of the essential first-person accounts of the civil rights movement written from inside Mississippi, from inside the danger.

The Woolworth's building is gone now. A historical marker stands near the site on Capitol Street.