The Sit-Ins Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era
by Christopher W. Schmidt
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-0-226-52230-2 | Paper: 978-0-226-52244-9 | Electronic: 978-0-226-52258-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality.

The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change. The students’ actions initiated a national conversation over whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause extended to the activities of private businesses that served the general public. The courts, the traditional focal point for accounts of constitutional disputes, played an important but ultimately secondary role in this story. The great victory of the sit-in movement came not in the Supreme Court, but in Congress, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that recognized the right African American students had claimed for themselves four years earlier. The Sit-Ins invites a broader understanding of how Americans contest and construct the meaning of their Constitution.
 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Christopher Schmidt is professor of law and associate dean for faculty development at Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he also codirects the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is a faculty fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

REVIEWS

“Schmidt, one of our most talented young legal historians, has written an engaging and fast-paced narrative of one of the civil rights movement’s epic events: the sit-in demonstrations. Thoroughly researched and convincingly argued, Schmidt’s book is a model of the ‘new’ legal history: He demonstrates how ordinary Americans shape the development of constitutional law and how the sundry interactions of diverse institutions influence constitutional change in unpredictable ways. The sit-in movement finally has the legal history it deserves.”
— Michael Klarman, Harvard Law School, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality

“Schmidt has written the definitive legal treatment of the sit-in movement of the 1960s. He masterfully weaves together the social, political, and legal history of the transformative protests of the brave African American college students who challenged Jim Crow. Schmidt is unafraid to look at the messiness of the law—the confusions, gaps, and inconsistencies that most scholars try to neaten up. There is conflict here, and that conflict is deeply illuminating. The Sit-Ins tells a fascinating story that adds much to our understanding of the relationship between law and social movements, the role of popular constitutionalism outside the courts, and the meaning of the Constitution itself.”
— Risa L. Goluboff, dean, University of Virginia School of Law

"Christopher W. Schmidt's The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era masterfully reinserts the legal aspects of the sit-in protest back into he history of the U.S civil rights movement... This is a significant contribution to both civil rights and legal scholarship and will reframe the way scholars view the sit-in movement for some time to come."
— Melissa Milewski, American Historical Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.003.0001
[sit-ins;Greensboro;Woolworth;sit-in movement;students;lawyers;judges;law]
The book begins with the four African American college students who, on February 1, 1960, sat down at the “whites only” lunch counter of the Greensboro Woolworth store and asked to be served. Their actions set in motion a remarkable chain of events that inspired thousands of black students to join a lunch counter sit-in movement that exploded across the South in the following weeks and months. The Sit-ins draws attention to legal issues that other scholars have too often overlooked. A full account of the sit-in movement requires a recognition of the ways that ordinary citizens with little knowledge or interest in the intricacies of constitutional doctrine were nonetheless moved by their assumptions about what the law required, what it allowed, and what it prohibited. It also requires attention to the nuances of equal protection doctrine as it stood in the early 1960s, for this was the terrain on which lawyers and judges struggled to make sense of the students’ defiant challenge to the racial status quo. The sit-in protests offer a rich case study to examine the ways in which constitutional claims took shape and were transformed as they moved into and through the legal system.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.003.0002
[sit-ins;lunch counters;protest;students;citizenship]
This chapter centers on the African American students who took part in the lunch counter sit-in movement in the winter and spring of 1960. It explores the distinctive vision of civil rights around which this new generation of activists mobilized. The students saw the sit-ins as an effort to break away from the litigation and lobbying tactics that defined traditional civil rights activity at the time. They targeted a realm of racial discrimination—privately owned public accommodations—that, for reasons of strategy and law, established organizations had largely avoided. Their protest-centered approach could produce immediate, tangible results, which was a critical ingredient for movement mobilization. The students even discovered value in punishment. When thrown in jail on charges of trespass or disorderly conduct, many refused bail; when convicted they often chose to serve a jail sentence rather than pay a fine. The students transformed the legal system from a tool of redress to a platform to amplify their claim that racial discrimination in this realm of life was an affront to human dignity and a violation of their most basic rights as citizens.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.003.0003
[sit-ins;civil rights;sympathizers;popular constitutionalism;dignity;equality;Constitution]
This chapter explains why the lunch counter sit-in movement gained such substantial support from varied sources and considers the different ways this support was expressed. White college students in the North organized sympathy protests; religious and civic groups issued statements praising the movement; President Eisenhower as well as both major party candidates in the 1960 presidential contest indicated support for the students’ cause. This chapter also shows the key role that outside sympathizers played in transforming the legal significance of the sit-ins. Sympathizers translated the students’ bold claims for dignity and equality into the language of “popular constitutionalism”—the rich blend of legal norms, moral sensibilities, and public policy with which the American people contest, and sometimes remake, the meaning of the Constitution. By considering how an eclectic cast of characters, from national political leaders to ordinary citizens, understood the sit-ins, this chapter charts how an aspirational constitutional claim—a claim, that is, without solid footing as a matter of court-defined constitutional law—took shape in the crucible of public discourse. The sit-ins show how public expectations about the Constitution can be shaped not only by signals from authoritative constitutional interpreters but also by transformative acts of social protest.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.003.0004
[sit-ins;segregationists;conservatism;right to discriminate]
This chapter examines those who opposed the sit-in movement. Following recent trends in the historiography of modern American conservatism, one of the chapter’s goals is to demonstrate the diversity of interests and tactics contained within a group that too often has been lumped into the monolithic category of “segregationists.” Divisions among southern whites were particularly consequential in the sit-in movement because of the distinctive legal issues involved. Many lunch counter operators felt caught in a battle they did not want to fight. Local officials often tried to stay above the fray, while state-level political leaders regularly urged crackdowns on the protests. These divisions ultimately benefited the movement. The legal factor that made the constitutional claim of the sit-in protesters such a challenge to existing equal protection doctrine in the courts—the fact that these were private businesses—also made mobilizing in opposition to the sit-ins much more difficult. Meanwhile, segregationist ideologues launched a constitutional counter-offensive, proclaiming that private business operators had a legally protected “right to discriminate.” Although opponents lost more than they won in the battle over racial discrimination at lunch counters, their constitutional vision helped shape its outcome.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.003.0005
[sit-ins;Supreme Court;justices;Warren Court;Hugo Black;Fourteenth Amendment;state action;Bell v. Maryland;public accommodations;Civil Rights Act]
This chapter examines the Supreme Court’s confrontation with the sit-in cases. Between 1961 and 1964, the justices faced round after round of appeals of criminal convictions of sit-in protesters. These cases were the great aberration of the Warren Court. At a time when the justices confidently reworked one constitutional doctrine after another, often in response to the moral challenges of the civil rights movement and often in the face of considerable public resistance, they broke pattern in the sit-in cases. The Court overturned the convictions on narrow, fact-based grounds, avoiding the looming constitutional question of the limits of “state action” under the Fourteenth Amendment. In late 1963, in the case of Bell v. Maryland, when another minimalist opinion appeared impossible, a majority of the Court, led by Justice Hugo Black, was prepared to explicitly reject the students’ constitutional claim. This outcome was only averted when, in the spring of 1964, with Congress poised to pass the Civil Rights Act, Justice Black’s majority dissolved, and a fractured Court issued yet another narrow opinion, with no majority to resolve the constitutional question one way or the other. This chapter explains why the sit-in cases caused such dramatic difficulties for the Court.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.003.0006
[sit-ins;Congress;Civil Rights Act;Title II;public accommodations;Fourteenth Amendment;Supreme Court;justices]
This chapter centers on the people who crafted, debated, and made into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of the various provisions in this landmark legislation, none was recognized as more important or more controversial at the time of passage than Title II, the section that prohibited racial discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and other public accommodations. The focus of this chapter is on a lesser-known element in the history of this famous piece of federal legislation: the role the constitutional questions that the sit-in movement raised about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment played in the struggle for a federal public accommodations law. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Congress would do what the Supreme Court had not: provide a national remedy for the claim to nondiscriminatory treatment that the sit-in protesters had demanded four years earlier at lunch counters across the South. The chapter concludes by returning to the Supreme Court, where the justices considered constitutional challenges to the Civil Rights Act and the effect of the new law on the thousands of sit-ins cases that remained on appeal.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522586.003.0007
[sit-ins;protest;social movement;constitutional change]
In its conclusion, the book returns to where it began, with the story of the four students in Greensboro in February 1960 and the remarkable cascade of events their protest set in motion. Key to understanding how all this happened—how an isolated act of protest turned into a social movement and how this social movement set off a constitutional debate that would transform the nation—requires an appreciation to the distinctive legal issues surrounding the sit-ins. The story of the sit-ins offers a powerful case study of the complex and often unpredictable process of constitutional change in modern America. For each generation of Americans, the challenge is to find new ways to combine social protest and legal claims to disrupt those practices and policies that perpetuate old inequalities and create new ones. The lunch counter sit-in movement shows that it can be done.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...