TIME MAGAZINE -

(March 14, 1960)

 As quickly as the white South stamped out one spark, the brushfire caught in dozens of faraway communities. In five weeks, Negro "sit-in" demonstrations at segregated lunch counters had raced from North Carolina to South Carolina to Virginia to Florida to Tennessee and into Deep South Alabama. A unique protest against Jim Crow kindled by four college freshmen in Greensboro, N.C., the Gandhi-like Negro civil disobedience campaign, without any apparent central organized direction, continued to spread:

 In Montgomery, Ala., after a white man beat a Negro woman with a baseball bat in a sidewalk incident, 1,000 Negroes silently marched to the white-columned first capitol of the Confederate states to pray and sing the Star-Spangled Banner.

 In Orangeburg, S.C., 600 students from two Negro colleges paraded in the streets with placards that proclaimed "We Want Liberty" and "Segregation Is Dead." Arrested after a scuffle were a white man and a Negro girl.

 As it crackled across the South, the lunch counter protest burned most vividly in tinder-dry Tennessee, where fortnight ago Chattanooga firemen were forced to turn hoses on several thousand rioting whites and Negroes. Last week the flames leaped to Nashville, as 500 Negroes surged through downtown variety, drug and department stores, left a wake of closed counters and pushed on to the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals. Sixty-four Negro students were arrested, most of them for refusing to leave the Greyhound lunch counter while police searched for a reported bomb.