Southern Food and Civil Rights by Frederick Douglass Opie

Southern Food and Civil Rights by Frederick Douglass Opie

Author:Frederick Douglass Opie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


Protests and Sit-Ins

Raphael Cassimere Jr. was a student at the University of New Orleans in 1960. He joined the newly established NAACP Youth Council in July 1960. He participated in “the first sit-ins at lunch counters against F.W. Woolworth and some other stores. This was in September of 1960.” Cassimere said that “most of the people” who initially participated in the movement had attended his high school. “Some of us had been friends before, so obviously we all knew each other very well.” According to Cassimere, the movement mobilized diverse groups of protesters and supporters.171

He and other college students in New Orleans would “picket during their off-hours while they would work fulltime as students.” In addition to college students, the sit-in movement in New Orleans had mobilized “high school students, junior high students, and even a few elementary school students,” said Cassimere, who describes it as “a youth-led movement.”172

He also recalled that many whites picketed alongside African American protesters. Other white supporters gave financial and legal aid to the movement. In addition to the movement’s racial diversity, he noted that the protesters had religious diversity among them. Cassimere described the movement in New Orleans as an “ecumenical movement” involving Christians, Jews and “a few Muslims at that time.”173

During protests, police arrested protesters picketing at Walgreens, Winn-Dixie and the TG&Y dime store. The demonstration included members of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP and the sponsoring organization for the protest, the CLGNO. A crowd of nearly three hundred gathered nearby to cheer on five arrested men despite warnings from New Orleans mayor DeLesseps Morrison that police would arrest anyone involved in public protest. The September 1960 protest served as the first such demonstration in the city. CLGNO leader Henry R. Mitchell, thirty-nine at the time, said that his organization and its supporters would “fill up the jail” before they stopped demonstrating against racist hiring practices in a shopping district in which black folks represented 90 percent of the store customers. He went on to say they had a “good supply” of reserves on hand to take the place of those arrested. Protesters on the picket line carried signs that read, “Don’t buy where you can’t work” and “First-Class Dollars for First-Class Jobs.”174

New Orleans police arrested Sydney L. Goldfinch, a twenty-one-year-old male Tulane University undergraduate student, charging him with criminal anarchy, criminal mischief and disturbing the peace. The anarchy charge carried a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. Police arrested Goldfinch four days after he had participated in an integrated sit-in movement at a McCrory’s store lunch counter with three African American students—twenty-two-year-old Cecil Carter, twenty-one-year-old Rudolph Lombard and twenty-one-year-old Aretha Kassel—in downtown New Orleans on September 17, 1960. The students said they came to end segregated lunch counters or get arrested. Newspapers reported that lunch counter arrests brought the number of persons picked up in a twenty-four-hour period for sit-ins and picketing a neighborhood shopping center to ten. During the course of the demonstration, as many as 1,500



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