February 8, 1960: Durham's Lunch Counter
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
February first, nineteen sixty: four Black students sat at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The story of what happened next is well known. The story of what happened in Durham seven days later is less told.
On February eighth, nineteen sixty, students from North Carolina College, now North Carolina Central University, organized sit-ins at three downtown Durham establishments: the Woolworth's, the S.H. Kress store, and the Walgreens lunch counter on Fayetteville Street. They sat. They were refused service. They remained seated. They read textbooks and talked quietly among themselves and did not leave.
The coalition that assembled in Durham that day was notably different from Greensboro. White Duke University students and a Congress of Racial Equality organizer named Gordon Carey are said to have joined the Durham protests.
The Woolworth's manager closed the entire store. The Kress management shut down its lunch counter. The Walgreens roped off its eating area. The students returned the following days.
Martin Luther King Jr. came to Durham on February sixteenth and addressed a large crowd at White Rock Baptist Church, a historically Black congregation that had been a center of Durham's civic life for decades. King is said to have praised what the students had done and connected it to the broader movement unfolding across the South.
The movement that Durham's students joined, and in some ways helped shape, continued for years beyond that. The multiracial character of the Durham protests was a glimpse of what the movement's leadership was still debating how to achieve.
