Today in the US, Black history month begins, on the anniversary of civil rights sit-ins beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960 when four Black college students refused to move from a Woolworth lunch counter when they were denied service. While many sit-ins had taken place in years prior, none had previously sparked a mass direct action movement against Jim Crow segregation laws.
On this day, 1 February 1960, Joseph McNeil, Jibreel Khazan, David Richmond and Franklin McCainand began their protest, and refused to leave Woolworth’s when directed to by management. A police officer soon arrived, but didn’t appear to know what to do other than look vaguely threatening. Eventually the manager decided to close the store, and then the men went home. McCain later told Christopher Wilson, a journalist with Smithsonian magazine, “Almost instantaneously, after sitting down on a simple, dumb stool, I felt so relieved. I felt so clean, and I felt as though I had gained a little bit of my manhood by that simple act”.
The protesters then continued organising, and came back the following day with up to 16 more people, and within a few days there were hundreds, including some white students from the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. The movement then spread around the country. By the following September over 70,000 people had participated in sit ins against segregation.
The Greensboro Woolworth’s desegregated on July 25, 1960, and overt segregation was eventually banned in 1964.
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Handcuffed and sobbing, the 9-year-old girl screams “I want my dad!” repeatedly as Rochester, N.Y., police officers try to force her into a patrol car. When the girl keeps refusing to swing her legs inside, one officer pulls out his pepper spray. “Just spray her at this point,” the unidentified male officer tells a female colleague in a video of the Friday incident. Moments later, the male officer sprays the girl himself as she shrieks in pain.
The graphic body-camera footage, which Rochester police released Sunday, left city leaders demanding answers for how a family disturbance call quickly escalated into a use of force against a young girl in obvious distress.
The footage has drawn new scrutiny onto a Rochester police force already in turmoil over its treatment of Daniel Prude, a mentally ill Black man who died in March after police put a hood over the 41-year-old’s head. Video from that incident sparked national protests and led to the firing of the police chief and a new emphasis on sending mental health experts rather than police to deal with similar crises.
But the video released Sunday shows not enough has changed, activists said.“ What we saw in that video is police escalating the situation rather than de-escalating,” said Ashley Gantt, a co-founder of Free the People Roc, a community activist group in Rochester.
