Greensboro sit-ins

The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in February to July 1960, primarily in the Woolworth store—now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum—in Greensboro, North Carolina, which led to the F. W. Woolworth Company department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. While not the first sit-in of the civil rights movement, the Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action, and also the best-known sit-ins of the civil rights movement. They are considered a catalyst to the subsequent sit-in movement, in which 70,000 people participated. This sit-in was a contributing factor in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In August 1939, African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized the Alexandria Library sit-in in Virginia (now the Alexandria Black History Museum). In 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored sit-ins in Chicago, as they did in St. Louis in 1949 and Baltimore in 1952. College students led a successful 1955 sit-in at Read's Drug Store in Baltimore, but the event received less widespread attention than the Greensboro sit-ins. The Dockum Drug Store sit-in in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, was successful in ending segregation at every Dockum Drug Store in Kansas and the Katz Drug Store sit-in in Oklahoma City the same year led the Katz Drug Stores to end its segregation policy. Like the Greensboro sit-ins, the participants in the two 1958 sit-ins employed a similar strategy and sought to desegregate store lunch counters. Between 1958 and 1964, Oklahoma City would serve as a hotspot for sit-ins.