Civil rights activists began using a sit-down at white-only restaurants and other facilities to fight segregation during the 1930s.

When four students from all-black North Carolina A & T College (Greensboro) sat at Woolworth's segregated lunch counter on February 1, 1960, they powerfully reclaimed that tactic of nonviolent protest. Sit-ins swept seventy-eight cities and towns in North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia by April, when student leaders formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By then more than 2,000 protesters had been arrested, many injured from violent attacks. SNCC used the sit-in and voter registration to promote desegregation, black enfranchisement, and “a coalition of conscience” for racial and social justice. Its campaigns won invaluable support from others, including Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a sponsor of 1940s sit-downs; NAACP Youth Councils, sponsors of the Durham, North Carolina (1957) and Wichita, Kansas (1958) sit-ins; and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose staff member organized the Nashville sit-ins (1959).