The 1960 lunch counter sit-ins at the Woolworth drug store in Greensboro, North Carolina became a catalyst for subsequent attempts to integrate lunch counters and restaurants across the South. Guy Carawan, contributor to the protest song “We Shall Overcome,” compiled a collection of songs on the Folkways record label which told the story of Nashville’s sit-ins that same year. When Tougaloo College students and faculty staged a sit-in at the Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi in May 1963, white onlookers reacted by pouring hot coffee and condiments as well as obscenities and punches on the peaceful protestors. The typed manuscript by Tougaloo chaplain Ed King conveys details of the scene. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited segregation in public accommodations, court records document the ongoing struggle African Americans faced in exercising these rights across Mississippi in the years that followed.

In the display case:

• We shall not be moved: The Jackson Woolworth's Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired / M. J. O'Brien
• Lunch-Counter Desegregation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina / Clarence H. Patrick

• Twelve petitioners vs. Panola County (Miss.) Sheriff and Chief of Police, for their attempt to desegregate Brown's Cafe in Batesville, Miss. (March 5, 1965)

• Nashville sit-in story: songs & scenes of Nashville lunch counter desegregation

• Document recounting the sit-in at Woolworth's in Jackson, Miss., Spring 1963