On this day, 10 February 1960, civil rights sit-ins that had been moving through North Carolina, after beginning in Greensboro, arrived in Raleigh. Around 150 Black students demonstrated against whites-only lunch counters at drugstores across the city; the drugstores responded by closing the counters. Protests continued for several days, and crowds of racist white people heckled and harassed the protesters, sometimes escalating into violence. One white woman even reprimanded the aggression of the counter-protesters, stating “You’re going about this in the wrong way… I’m as much a segregationist as you are, but I believe you should meet courtesy with courtesy.”
The mayor, WG Enloe, issued a public statement declaring: “It is regrettable that some of our young Negro students would risk endangering Raleigh’s friendly and cooperative race relations by seeking to change a long-standing custom in a manner that is all but destined to fail”.
But the protests were successful, and as part of a national direct action movement achieved the formal banning of segregation in 1964.
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