The Royal Ice Cream Sit-In Came First
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
Most Americans know the story of the Greensboro Four. On February first, nineteen sixty, four Black college students sat down at the whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave when told to. Their act of resistance sparked a wave of sit-in protests across the South.
What the standard account leaves out is what happened in Durham two and a half years earlier.
On June twenty-third, nineteen fifty-seven, seven Black residents of Durham, dressed carefully and deliberately, walked into the Royal Ice Cream Parlor on Roxboro Road. They entered through the colored entrance at the back, as required, and then walked to the white section and sat down. The manager told them to leave. They ordered ice cream. The police arrived. They were arrested, charged, and fined ten dollars plus court costs.
The group was organized by Reverend Douglas Moore of Asbury Temple Methodist Church. The participants included Mary Clyburn, Virginia Williams, Vivian Jones, Jesse Gray, Claude Glenn, and Melvin Willis. They appealed their convictions through the North Carolina courts and then to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The integrated lunch counter they sought remained segregated.
But the protest was documented. It was talked about. When the Greensboro students launched their sit-in in February nineteen sixty, they knew about Royal Ice Cream. Historians of the civil rights movement have noted that the Durham protest was part of the living knowledge circulating among Black students across the state.
Royal Ice Cream was finally integrated in nineteen sixty-three, when its owner sold the business. The original building no longer stands. A historical marker notes what happened there. Durham is not a footnote in the story of the sit-in movement. Durham was an early chapter in the sit-in story, years before Greensboro.
