To Sit or Not to Sit: The Supreme Court of the United States and the Civil Rights Movement in the Upper South

Abstract

In the early 1960s, Ford T. Johnson Jr. was an undergraduate at Virginia Union University, a black college in Richmond, Virginia. So was his sister, Elizabeth. On Saturday, February 20, 1960, they and dozens of classmates headed downtown to participate in sit-ins directed at segregated seating arrangements at the eating venues in the department stores that lined Broad Street. What motivated the Johnsons and the other black students who participated in the sit-in that Saturday was a commitment to bring segregation to an end—beginning with the integration of downtown Richmond's lunch counters. Whether the racial discrimination imposed in those stores reflected the express mandates of state laws and city ordinances or the private decisions of various enterprises did not matter to the demonstrators. Even if integrated service had been within the law, management at lunch counters and other establishments, relying on trespass laws, would still have called upon public authorities to eject demonstrators seeking desegregation.