“I Never Felt Any Cold Feet”

Abstract

The sit-in movement has often been portrayed in popular culture as a Deep South phenomenon with a majority of participants being college-educated males. This project provides a counter narrative by exploring the sit-in movement in the border town of Henderson, Kentucky, located less than ten miles from the Indiana border. The year 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of one of Henderson's major sit-in protests where the demonstrators were often female and as young as 13 years old. The participants’ first-hand accounts allow us to understand how age, gender and family background shaped civil disobedience during a turbulent time in U.S. race relations.

Keywords:

• age
• desegregation
• direct action
• family background
• gender
• Henderson
• Kentucky
• sit-in movement
• United States civil rights movement

Notes

Winston A. Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4–8.

Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York and London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan, 1984); Ronald Walters, “The Great Plains Sit-in Movement, 1958–60,” Great Plains Quarterly 16 (1996).

Gerald L. Smith, Lexington, Kentucky, 1st ed., Black America (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub., 2002), 113–126.

Tracy Elaine K'Meyer, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945–1980, Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 11–13.

Clay Mervin, Clay, Kenneth Aubespin, and Blaine J. Hudson, Two Centuries of Black Louisville: A Photographic History (Louisville, Canada: Butler Books, 2011), 27–28.

Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, 1st ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 198.

Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 13.

“Censusscope,” http://www.censusscope.org/us/m4520/chart_popl.html (accessed June 3, 2013).

U.S. Census, “General Social and Economic Characteristics,” Social Characteristics of the Population for Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas, Urbanized Areas, Ad Urban Places of 10,000 or More (1960).

Maralea Arnett, The Annals and Scandals of Henderson County, Kentucky, 1775–1975, First ed. (Henderson: Audubon Printer, 1976), 271–272.

Ibid., 272.

Ibid., 274.

Ibid., 282–287.

Marion Brunson Lucas and George C. Wright, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 2 vols. (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992), 17.

Letter to the American Library Association quoted in Marion Brunson Lucas and George C. Wright, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 2 vols (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992).

Jean Van Delinder, Struggles before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today, Advancing the Sociological Imagination (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 63.

U.S. Census, “Population by Sex, General Nativity, and Color, for Places Having 2,500 in Habitants,” Statistics of Population (1900).

Henderson County Deed Book, 50:12, 28, Henderson City Hall quoted in Marion Brunson Lucas and George C. Wright, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 2 vols (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992), 59.

Van Delinder, Struggles before Brown, 57.

Catherine Fosl and Tracy Elaine K'Meyer, Freedom on the Border: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky, Kentucky Remembered (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 19.

Dallas W. Sprinkles, The History of Evansville Blacks, First ed. (Evansville, IN: Mid-America Enterprises Publication, 1974), 71.

Van Delinder, Struggles before Brown, 4.

Unknown, “Young Negroes Stage Sit-In: No Violence,” Courier Journal, July 28, 1963.

"Youth Chapter of Naacp Stages Sit-in, Picketing of Restaurant,” Henderson Gleaner, July 28, 1963.

Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement.

Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid, 4.

Judy Winters Watkins, telephone interview by author, February 28, 2010.

Michael Jackson, telephone interview by author, February 11, 2010.

James Thomas, telephone interview by author, April 5, 2010.

Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York and London: Free Press; Collier McMillan, 1984), 194.

Anthony Brooks, telephone interview by author, February 4, 2010.

William Pointer, telephone interview by author, March 29, 2010.

Michael Jackson, telephone interview by author, February 11, 2010.

Aldon Morris, “Black Southern Student Sit-in Movement: An Analysis of Internal Organization,” American Sociological Review 46, no. 6 (1981), http://www.jstor.org.

Sidney Tarrow, “Frontiers in Social Movement Theory,” ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

Unknown, “Youth Chapter of Naacp Stages Sit-in, Picketing of Restaurant,” Henderson Gleaner, July 28, 1963.

Ibid.

William A. Gamson, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority, The Dorsey Series in Sociology (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1982).

William Pointer, telephone interview by author, March 29, 2010.

James Thomas, telephone interview by author, April 5, 2010.

Judy Winters Watkins, telephone interview by author, February 28, 2010.

Ibid.

Encounters with Unjust Authority, The Dorsey Series in Sociology (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1982), 121.

Anthony Brooks, telephone interview by author, February 4, 2010.

Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 189.

Photographer Al Nollmann, “Twenty-Four Demonstrators “Sit-in” at Ken's Korner,” Henderson Gleaner Undated.

Lawrence Daniel, telephone interview by author, March 6, 2010.

Anna May Nesmith, telephone interview by author, March 9, 2010. Nesmith died in November 2012 at the age of 95.

Andrew B. Lewis, The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation, 1st ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 36.

K'Meyer, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South, 53.

Fosl and K'Meyer, Freedom on the Border, 67.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, Blacks in the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 218–219.

Dorothy I. Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir, 1st ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 156.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Gender & American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 52.

Judy Winters Watkins, telephone interview by author, February 28, 2010.

Gloria Holguin Cuadraz, “Intersectionality and in-Depth Interviews: Methodological Strategies for Analyzing Race, Class and Gender,” Race, Class, and Gender 6 (1999): 169.

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Themes in the Social Sciences (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 58.

Faith S. Holsaert, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 3.

Cuadraz, “Intersectionality and in-Depth Interviews.”

Walters, “The Great Plains Sit-in Movement, 1958–60.”

Census, “General Social and Economic Characteristics.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ava Thompson Greenwell

Ava Thompson Greenwell is Associate Professor in broadcast journalism at the Medill School, Northwestern University. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the African American Studies program at Northwestern. Her dissertation will focus on the history of black women in United States television news management. Her research interests include black women and journalism.