The sit-in campaigns of 1960 and the ensuing creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) demonstrated the potential strength of grass-roots militancy and enabled a new generation of young people to gain confidence in their own leadership. Although Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed pride in the new activism for being “initiated, led and sustained by students,” he often found himself the target of criticisms from SNCC activists who believed he was too cautious.
The campaigns were initiated on 1 February 1960 when four black students from North Carolina A&T College sat down at Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. The students—Joseph McNeil, Izell Blair, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond—purchased several items in the store before sitting at the counter reserved for white customers. When a waitress asked them to leave, they politely refused; and to their surprise, they were not arrested. The four students remained seated for almost an hour until the store closed.
The following morning about two dozen students arrived at Woolworth’s and sat at the lunch counter. While no confrontations occurred, the second sit-in attracted the local media. By day three of the campaign, the students had formed the Student Executive Committee for Justice to coordinate protests which would culminate in a march of several thousand students. The Greensboro protesters eventually agreed to the mayor’s request to halt protest activities while city officials sought “a just and honorable solution,” but black students in other communities launched lunch counter protests of their own. By the end of the month, sit-ins had taken place at more than thirty locations in seven states.
The sustained student protests in Nashville, Tennessee, were particularly well-organized. Vanderbilt Divinity School student James Lawson led workshops on Gandhian nonviolence that attracted a number of students from Nashville's black colleges. Many of them, including John Lewis and Diane Nash, would later become leaders of the southern civil rights struggle. Lawson also enlisted Marion Barry, a Fisk University graduate student. The Nashville movement proved successful, and the students grew ever more confident in their ability to direct campaigns without adult leadership.
Although many of the student sit-in protesters were affiliated with National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth groups, the new student movement offered an implicit challenge to the litigation strategy of the nation's oldest civil rights group. NAACP leaders, for their part, gave public support to the sit-ins, although some privately questioned the usefulness of student-led civil disobedience.
By fall of 1960 there were signs that the southern civil rights movement had been profoundly transformed by the fiercely independent student protest movement. Those who had participated in the sit-in campaign were determined to continue the direct-action tactics that were seizing the initiative from older, more cautious organizations such as King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).