Royal Ice Cream sit-in

The Royal Ice Cream Sit-in was a non-violent protest in Durham, North Carolina, which led to a court case testing the legality of segregated facilities. The demonstration took place on the evening of June 23, 1957. Seven African-American protesters, led by Reverend Douglas E. Moore, entered the Royal Ice Cream Parlor, sat in the section reserved for white people and asked for service. Known as “the Royal Seven”, the group included three women: Mary Elizabeth Clyburn, Vivian Jones and Virginia Williams, and four men: Reverend Douglas E. Moore, Claude Glenn, Jesse W. Gray, and Melvin Willis. The sit-in sparked debates within the African-American communities in Durham about the strategies of civil rights activism. By challenging the delicate racial harmony, the event led to a surge of direct actions in lieu of pacific, compromising strategies. In the long run, the Royal Ice Cream Sit-in also contributed to future movements, including the Greensboro sit-ins. It promoted coordination and communication among local African-American civil rights activists, especially among church ministers who served as movement centers during the 1960s sit-ins.

Historical Context

In 1896, the United States Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation of public facilities under the doctrine of “separate but equal”. The separation in practice led to inferior conditions for African Americans, especially in the Southern states.

Meanwhile, Durham had a reputation throughout the South as a “unique town… that is more liberal than what you would expect in a Southern state,” according to Durham native and civil rights leader Pauli Murray. In Durham, racial conflicts were arguably less severe than in other Southern towns. Durham’s black population enjoyed more opportunities. Most black workers earned their livings in the tobacco plants. Prominent leaders established their own businesses and developed a prosperous black neighborhood called “Hayti”, which had its own store, theaters, restaurants and hospital. But Jim Crow laws were still rooted in Durham. Separation in almost all spheres of public life resulted in inferior facilities and fewer opportunities for black people. African Americans were barred from skilled employment and suffered from discrimination and poverty constantly. Their living spaces were also restricted to areas less desirable than the white community. The railroad tracks separated the two races – on one side, beautiful houses of the white people, the other lined with a string of boarded-up houses, garbage thrown all around, and half-naked, barefoot black children played in the street. The causes of the civil rights movement were the same as anywhere else: racial discrimination, injustice and segregation.

Events and Sentiments Leading up to the Sit-in

A crucial factor that led to the sit-in was the growing conflict between two generations of black civil rights activists. In Durham, the struggle to end racial segregation began with the organization in 1935 of the DCNA (Durham Committee on Negro Affairs), which signaled escalation of challenges to Jim Crow. Its efforts in the 1940s included seizing job opportunities for blacks and having them registered as voters. Yet after World War II, a period when blacks enjoyed comparative social equality and freedom, the young generation was forced back into inferior positions and found this renewed segregation unacceptable. They were also dissatisfied with the stabilizing role DCNA played in the racial problems and they questioned the efficacy of such an approach. Newspaperman Louis Austin, a powerful ally of Rev. Moore’s, wrote a week before the sit-in, “This newspaper senses a stagnation that is beginning to creep over the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs which, if allowed to continue, is certain to spell its doom…. The DCNA is becoming too high-brow, too soft and too compromising.” Austin continued in this editorial to call for “new blood, new faces and new ideas”. This prevalent sentiment of young Durham black leaders against the conservative DCNA (Durham Committee on Negro Affairs) helped Moore rally a group of supporters, who represented the voice of the new generation.

The Royal Ice Cream Sit-in was a continuation of Reverend Douglas Moore’s strategies of breaking the backbone of segregation in North Carolina. Douglass E. Moore (1928-), born in Hickory, North Carolina, earned his B.A. (1949) from North Carolina College and his S.T.B. (1953) and S.T.M. (1958) from Boston University. At that time, he served as the pastor of Asbury Temple Methodists Church in Durham, North Carolina. Before this sit-in, Moore already made several attempts to integrate public facilities. On June 13, 1957, he and his family were denied admission to the all-white Long Meadow Park swimming pool, and he immediately appealed unsuccessfully to city recreation officers. Prior to the swimming pool incident, he had also petitioned the City Council for an end to segregation at Durham Public Library and the Carolina Theater. Moore initiated this sit-in as an experiment to test what the black protesters could achieve at that time, and to gain insights into what other resources were needed if they wanted to make more progress.

The Role of the Black Church

In a letter Moore wrote to Martin Luther King Jr. on October 3, 1956, he articulates this argument, by proposing “regional group which uses the power of nonviolence would help give us direction on national movements”. In this fight for equality, Christianity served as an ideological base for black leaders. Douglas Moore studied Theology in Boston University with Martin Luther King Jr., and his Christian faith strengthened his confidence in his beliefs and the movement he led. In the letter to King he wrote, “Whenever a person threatens us with brutality and even death he is assuming that we value our lives more than eternal principles. I feel that my philosophical and theological belief in immortality comes to my aid in this situation…”

Additionally, ministers such as Moore knew that historically the church had been the central institution within black communities, which nurtured prominent leaders and organized masses. The church came to be recognized as the primary force in black history and culture. Sociologist Aldon Morris argued, “The church was functioning as the institutional vanguard of a mass based black movement”. In 1957 the organizers of SCLC sent out a call to fellow clergymen of the south to organize their congregations and local communities for collective protest. Around this time, Douglas Moore was rallying a group of young activists called “ACT”, and among them were the later Royal Ice Cream Sit-in participants. They met at the church every Sunday afternoon to talk about how to “push the envelope of Jim Crow’s Law.” Long before the sit-in, leaders of local communities like Moore began to form alliances in order to promote a national movement. They started to train young activists into “professional” non-violent protesters, using the church as an organizational base. Activist Gordon Carey observantly noted, “…When we reached these cities we went directly to the movement oriented churches.” When asked why, he replied, “Well, that’s where the protest activities were being planned and organized.”

The Demonstration and the Trial

On June 23, 1957, 28-year-old Reverend Douglas E. Moore, a young black minister, led six other black students (three women and three men) into the segregated Royal Ice Cream Parlor, located at the corner of Roxboro and Dowd Streets. The group came in through the back door, sat down in the white section and asked to be served. Louis Coletta, owner of the dairy bar, urged them to leave and called police when they declined.

Police Lt. Wallace Upchurch led a group of officers to make the arrests, and he testified that Moore and the others refused to leave or go to the side reserved for colored patrons. The next day, the seven protesters were convicted in the Durham Recorder’s Court of trespassing and were fined 10 dollars plus court costs for each defendant.

The protester immediately appealed to Durham County Superior Court, which released the decision on July 16, 1957. Their convictions were upheld and their fines increased to 25 dollars each. The case went all the way up to the State Supreme Court and the protesters lost the third round in their fight on January 10, 1958. Associate Justice William B. Rodman said the 14th Amendment prohibits discriminatory actions by states but “erects no shield against merely private conduct, however, discriminatory or wrongful.” They appealed to U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear their case.

Sparked by the Royal Ice Cream incident, local protests continued for years, mainly led and inspired by Douglas Moore and Floyd McKissick, a black attorney and a prominent black leader. They also began a six-year struggle to integrate the parlor.

Short-term Impacts

This first attempt at desegregation provoked a controversy within the black community in Durham, because the young activists threatened the delicate balance that had been cautiously maintained by the leadership of DCNA. Other well-established organizations such as Durham’s black Ministerial Alliance and the Durham NAACP also criticized Moore’s “radical” efforts. At that time, the local NAACP was still fighting for a prolonged legal struggle against Durham’s school segregation, and worried that losing the case might set a dangerous legal precedent and also divert the organization’s energy. In brief, the more experienced black leaders in Durham viewed the sit-in as a premature and risky act led by a radical, young outsider.

Despite all these initial doubts, the 1957 sit-in sparked within the Durham black community a serious debate on strategies for future protests. The Durham Committee on Negro Affairs’ Economic Committee, headed by Floyd McKissick and Nathaniel White Sr., discussed whether to launch a boycott of the ice cream parlor. However, several committee members questioned the approach, because the owner of Royal Ice Cream Parlor, Louis Coletta, was a Greek American. Even Douglass Moore himself, who supported the boycott proposal, admitted that Coletta was “a member of a minority group” and that his parlor might not be the ideal target. A heated discussion was on going ever since the sit-in. New ideas were generated. Although DCNA and other organizations did not back up the protesters, the sit-in did prompt them to reevaluate their roles in dismantling Jim Crow. It also encouraged community-wide black boycotts and direct actions, which were forerunners of later collective movements.

This unsuccessful attempt did inspire a surge of youth enthusiasm, as black students continued to carry out the most active protests and challenge the conservatism of Durham’s elder and privileged African-American circles. A group of high school NAACP members, more than half of them girls, organized regular pickets outside the Royal Ice Cream Parlor, under the direction of Floyd McKissick. The students refused to place their hopes in the protracted process of seeking justice in the courts. Nor did they trust the slow and quiet diplomacy adopted by the black elites. The Royal Ice Cream Sit-in spread the idea of direct action among Durham’s black students. Though it did not immediately initiate subversion, the sit-in encouraged a mass of students to take initiatives in concrete actions, and these sentiments paved road for future movements. The continuation of the sit-ins and other forms of non-violent resistance eventually succeeded. In 1960, the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations revealed a planned program for desegregation of Durham lunch counters and Durham officially became the seventh town in North Carolina to integrate its lunch counter service. Desegregation was effected starting on a limited basis, and mass demonstrations by Durham blacks continued to 1963 when public facilities were finally desegregated.

Long-term Significance

In the long run, the sit-in had a profound tactical and strategic influence over the entire course of social and political upheavals of the 1960s. It revealed problems in tactics of the protests and gave directions to future collective movements. Even though they were aware of the black people’s lack of political rights, leaders like Douglas Moore and Floyd McKissick still learned from the sit-in the extreme oppression of black people politically. The black organizations had no control over legal agents and mass media: The jury of the Superior Court was all white and they found the protesters guilty after 24 minutes of deliberation. Newspapers in Durham such as Durham Morning Herald printed the sit-in on the front page while it was buried inside the Raleigh News and Observer. There was little coverage of the sit-in on a national scale. These facts showed the black leaders how powerful white dominance was in the political structure, and urged them to make use of resources within the black communities for future actions, instead of aiming at attracting the sympathy from the outside.

The sit-in also encouraged leaders to organize “local movement centers”, which served as the basic structures that facilitated and supported collective actions. Local activists like Moore had been building up “direct action” organizations throughout the south during the 1950s. They used the black churches as institutional bases for training and supporting student protesters. But since this unsuccessful attempt, Moore began to realize the importance of alliances between these black movement centers in the south. Moore and McKissick began planning a nationwide sit-in movement that would start from Durham. During that time, they contacted with activists in other movement centers throughout North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, urging them to train students for sit-ins. These networks that Douglas Moore and other activists set up were a foundation for major collective actions. After the Greensboro sit-ins, activists made use of this connection by calling up each other and asking if they were ready to move. On February 3, 1960, Douglas Moore spoke with civil rights activist James M. Lawson in Nashville and urged him to speed up his plans to desegregate Woolworth. That spring, the sit-ins spread all over the southern states were not something by contagion or prompted by mass media, but a collective movement made possible only by rational planning and networks established by activists beforehand. As Douglas Moore commented in 1960, “If Woolworth and other stores think that this is just another panty raid, they haven’t had their sociologists in the field recently.”

Commemoration and Memory

Overall, the Royal Ice-cream Sit-in had less publicity than the Greensboro sit-ins three years later, which were widely held as the first sit-ins in the nation. In 1979, when the Associated Press carried a story that the state Highway Historical Marker Commission would issue a marker to commemorate the first sit-in – in Greensboro, it sparked a heated debate whether the Greensboro could be recognized as the first. Lawyer Blackwell M. “Dog” Brogden, who helped prosecute the Royal Ice-cream Sit-in protesters, claimed that the marker commemorating the event should be at Durham. Though the Greensboro Sit-ins were not the beginning of the movement, they were a unique link that triggered sit-ins across the South at an incredible pace. The four students who sat in at Greensboro had been members of the NAACP council, headed by Floyd McKissick. According to McKissick, he knew all these four students well before the sit-in and they knew well about the Durham activities. The network of ministers, churches and civil rights leaders was in place long before the Greensboro sit-ins. Once massive sit-ins began at Greensboro, these local movement centers received the information and plotted their own organizational movements in response. The experience gained and connections built through earlier protests such as the Royal Ice Cream Sit-in helped the Greensboro Sit-ins became a collective national movement.

Hence, the debate was about the standard of determining the historical importance of a civil right struggle. The Royal Ice Cream Sit-in was an earlier protest, but the Greensboro Sit-ins served as a link in a chain of movements. Attempts to have a historical marker on the former location of the Royal Ice Cream Parlor were turned down at least four times dating to 1979 because the state's Highway Historic Marker Committee believed it “did not have enough significance.” Yet to the people in Durham, especially those who witnessed the progress since the sit-in, the small group’s courageous challenge to racial inequality was essential in the civil rights history of Durham. “I can remember those days,” said the Durham school board member Omega Parker. “It was in the newspapers and we were all aware of it. Something needs to be done.”

Eventually, neither Durham nor Greensboro received a historical marker stating it was the site of the first civil rights sit-in in the nation. But the committee reversed its previous decision and acknowledged the historical significance of the Royal Ice Cream Sit-in. In 2007, a historical marker was finally placed at the site of the sit-in, which read, “ROYAL ICE CREAM SIT-IN Segregation protest at an ice cream parlor on this site, June 23, 1957, led to court case testing dual racial facilities.”