Learn
Read markers 1, 2, 3 to learn more about a sit-in at Woolworth's department store in Jackson, Mississippi on May 28, 1963.
- John Slater is the man sitting at the counter in the picture. The following information is his account of the event. "This was the most violently attacked sit-in during the 1960s and is the most publicized. A huge mob gathered, with open police support while the three of us sat there for three hours. I was attacked with fists, brass knuckles and the broken portions of glass sugar containers, and was burned with cigarettes. I'm covered with blood and we were all covered by salt, sugar, mustard, and various other things."
- John Salter, Joan Trumpauer, and Anne Moody sit in at the downtown Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi on May 28, 1963.
- After an ongoing boycott of white-owned stores proves incapable of breaking segregation, student activists trained in nonviolence sit in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson. They are surrounded by a mob of whites who curse them, punch them, kick them, and douse them with mustard, ketchup, and sugar. The direct action gives rise to mass meetings, mass marches, mass arrests, and an iconic photograph of the protestors, above. They included Anne Moody, whose autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi would become a classic text of the times.