The Greenville Eight: A Library, a Sit-In, and Jesse Jackson
Near Greenville, South Carolina
On the afternoon of July sixteenth, nineteen sixty, eight young Black students walked into the whites-only Greenville County Public Library on Heritage Green and sat down in the reading room. They picked up newspapers and books and began to read.
One of those eight was a college freshman named Jesse Jackson, home in Greenville on summer break from the University of Illinois. Jackson had come to Greenville in January needing a book to write a paper. The book he needed was not at the colored branch library, a small one-room building on East McBee Avenue. So he and seven other students, including Dorris Wright, Hattie Smith Wright, Elaine Means, Willie Joe Wright, Benjamin Downs, Margaree Seawright Crosby, and Joan Mattison Daniel, organized what became one of the quietly pivotal protests of the civil rights era in South Carolina.
The librarian told them to leave. They did not. He called the police. The sit-in lasted approximately forty minutes before officers arrived and arrested all eight on charges of disorderly conduct. The students were removed, processed, and released. The charges were later dropped.
But the ripple moved outward. Within weeks, lunch counter sit-ins began at W. T. Grant Company and S. H. Kress and Company in downtown Greenville. Officials closed the library system after the protest and quietly reopened it, integrated, that September.
Three years later, the national significance of Greenville's segregation ordinance reached the United States Supreme Court. In Peterson versus the City of Greenville, decided on May twentieth, nineteen sixty-three, the court ruled unanimously that the arrest and conviction of ten Black protesters who had sat at a Kress lunch counter violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling held that when a city ordinance commands segregation, the state has effectively removed any choice from the property owner, making the exclusion state action. It was a landmark holding, and the case that built it happened right here.
