Durham sit-ins flyer

Bill Sharpe, Class of 1960, Duke University Divinity School, attended Martin Luther King Jr.'s February 16, 1960 speech at White Rock Baptist Church and was inspired to participate the next morning in a sit-in at Durham's Kress department store lunch counter. Sharpe was chair of the Social Actions Committee at the Divinity School and joined student government petitions in the preceding months to repeal the policy preventing black students from enrolling in Duke's seminary. Months of nonviolent student protesting including sit-ins and picketing were organized in Durham and throughout the South following Greensboro, North Carolina student sit-ins begun on February 1, 1960 when David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and Joseph McNeil, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, were refused service at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth's. Earlier local efforts to challenge segregation in Durham included Reverend Douglas E. Moore leading a group of seven people in June 1957 to request service in the white-only section of Durham's Royal Ice Cream parlor, who were refused, and then arrested for trespassing. The text in the collection apparently printed from a Duke alumni magazine article cites an April 1960 memo to Dean Cushman and President A. Hollis Edens calling for a boycott of Duke Divinity School classes during Good Friday.