Twelve million black Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The slave population in the United States had grown to four million by the 1860 Census.
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1, 1863, freeing all slaves.
In a bid to stop black Americans from being equal, the southern states passed a series of laws known as Jim Crow laws which discriminated against blacks and made sure that they were segregated from whites.
David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil inspired student sit-ins and protests that spread across the South. Within days, sit-ins were occurring at Woolworth and Kress stores from New York to San Francisco.
February 1st, 1960, these four students from North Carolina sit down at a "whites-only" Woolworth's lunch counter and ask to be served. They are refused. They are ready to be arrested, but are not. They stay until the store closes. The next day they return, now joined by others. They sit from 11am to 3pm but again are not served. Instead they sit and study. The local media cover this second sit-in. The students form the Student Executive Committee for Justice and they receive NAACP endorsement.
The sit-ins, picket lines, and boycotts continue off and on as negotiations get under way, the lunch counters are closed and reopened. Woolworth and Kress stores in the North and West are boycotted and picketed in support of the sit-in movements that are now spreading across the upper and mid South. Dudley High students carry on the movement as the college students leave for the summer. In July, the national drugstore chains agree to serve all "properly dressed and well behaved people," regardless of race.
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