The Chattanooga History Center announces that its 2008 History Makers Award will spotlight a momentous series of student-led sit-ins that unfolded in Chattanooga during February of 1960. Presented annually by the History Center, the Award recognizes significant contributions to the course of local, regional, state or national history.
“In announcing this year’s History Makers Award, we are proud to give long-overdue honor and recognition to events that changed the course of history and race relations in Chattanooga,” said Gail Pollock, the Center’s Executive Director. “The award itself will be placed at Howard High School, alma mater of the brave young men and women who acted as agents of change in organizing and implementing non-violent civil rights activism in Chattanooga.”
History Center Curator Dr. Daryl Black and historian Dr. Clark White are heading a research task force aimed at interpreting the Chattanooga sit-ins within the broader context of the American civil rights movement. The task force is working closely with the production staff of WTCI TV, the region’s PBS affiliate, on a short video documentary that will debut at the public presentation of the 2008 History Makers Award.
By the end of the 1950s, several American cities had experienced non-violent civil rights protests, resulting in legal and political backlash of varying intensity. Although Chattanooga had a long history of civil rights activism, the mid 20th-century movement had not yet touched the daily life of the city. On the afternoon of Friday, February 19, 1960, however, thirty local African-American high school students walked into three downtown Chattanooga variety stores and quietly took seats at their traditionally segregated lunch counters.
Many of those involved in the demonstration were seniors in the Howard High School class of 1960. The teens followed a list of rules for conduct, handwritten and circulated by fellow Howard High students who had planned and organized the protest. Rules included such admonitions as “no loud talking,” “buy something,” and “no profanity.” The February 19 demonstration was the first in a series that occurred over the next few days of that month, each subsequent sit-in attracting a larger pool of participants and opposition. “The students’ leadership served as a springboard,” said 2008 History Makers committee chair Mary Lynn Wilson, “galvanizing the civil rights movement in Chattanooga, creating the awareness that change was in the air and accelerating the process of racial integration in our city.”
Virgil Roberson, one of the 1960 Howard High seniors who helped plan the sit-ins, said, “It was on college campuses where the Civil Rights demonstrations were active in other cities. We didn’t have that happening in Chattanooga. It became clear to us that, even though we were just in high school and likely to get in trouble with our parents, we simply had to act.”
Participants in the 1960 sit-ins will be recognized during a public luncheon on Wednesday, November 19, at Chattanooga’s historic Sheraton Read House. Along with the WTCI documentary presentation, the program will include a brief performance entitled, The Howard High Sit-ins, by four Tyner High Academy students who created the piece for the History Center’s 2008 Southeast Tennessee District History Day last March. After earning first place awards in the Senior Performance Division at both the District and the Tennessee State History Day competitions, the students went on to perform their entry in June at the National History Day competition in College Park, MD.
The History Makers Luncheon is the Chattanooga History Center’s major annual fund raiser. Past recipients of History Makers Awards include Ruth S. Holmberg, Mr. & Mrs. John T. Lupton and the Lyndhurst Foundation, Rev. Paul McDaniel and Dalton Roberts. For more information, call 423-265-3247.
