The Sit-In That Won First

Most people know about the Greensboro sit-ins of February first, nineteen sixty. They should. Four Black students at North Carolina A and T sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter on Elm Street and refused to leave until they were served. It was a pivotal moment in American civil rights history.

What fewer people know is that the first victory of the sit-in movement, the first city to actually desegregate its lunch counters as a result of the protests, was not Greensboro. It was Winston-Salem.

A week after Greensboro, on February eighth, nineteen sixty, a man named Carl Wesley Matthews sat down alone at the Kress lunch counter in downtown Winston-Salem. Matthews had graduated from what was then called Winston-Salem Teachers College. He began his protest without organization, without announcement, without a group behind him. He was the only person there.

Students from Winston-Salem Teachers College and from Atkins High School joined the demonstrations over the following days. On February twenty-third, ten students from Wake Forest College walked into the Woolworth's on Liberty Street and sat down alongside eleven Black students from Winston-Salem State, making it one of the first interracial sit-in coalitions in the South. Police arrested all twenty-one of them on trespassing charges.

The protests continued for the next several months. On May twenty-third, nineteen sixty, the restaurants and lunch counters of Winston-Salem were desegregated. That was roughly one hundred five days after Carl Matthews walked in alone. No other city in North Carolina completed desegregation that quickly.

Matthews later said he had not expected to change anything that first day. He simply decided he could not keep walking past.

The Kress building where he sat still stands in downtown Winston-Salem.