Lunch Counter Sit-In Movement Spread 'Like A Wildfire' From Arlington Across NoVA

ARLINGTON, VA — The American civil rights movement has many famous moments that are often highlighted in U.S. history books, from the sit-ins at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 to the March on Washington in 1963 to the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama in 1965.

A small stretch of Langston Boulevard in Arlington also is rich with its own civil rights history, from the four students who desegregated Stratford Junior High School in 1959 to the sit-ins at the lunch counters of People’s Drug Store and Drug Fair in 1960.

These actions, which may not get the same exposure in either U.S. or Virginia history books as the other important moments in civil rights history, challenged both the racial segregation enforced by Virginia law and the segregation imposed by business owners.

Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Virginia law required owners of movie theaters, concert venues and other public halls to designate separate sections for white and Black people.

Virginia did not have a law at the time, though, to enforce segregation at lunch counters and restaurants. But department stores and drug stores were allowed to prohibit Black customers from sitting at their lunch counters. The store owners could call the police, who would charge the Black customers with trespassing if they refused to leave their seats.

Many of the civil rights protests in Arlington in 1959 and 1960, especially along what was then called Lee Highway, played important roles in weakening segregation across Northern Virginia.

“One could take out-of-town guests on an impromptu civil rights tour of Arlington County,” local historian and Cherrydale resident Gregory Embree said in a presentation Thursday night to a crowd of about 100 people.

Driving down Langston Boulevard toward Rosslyn, residents could tell their guests, "You see that CVS Pharmacy, that used to be a People’s and was the first lunch counter sit-in in Northern Virginia," Embree said at the event.

The gathering was sponsored by the Arlington Historical Society and the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington and held in the Reinsch Library Auditorium at Marymount University.

Across Langston Boulevard from the CVS Pharmacy is a Capital One Bank that used to be a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, where the first restaurant sit-in occurred in Northern Virginia. On the left side of Langston Boulevard, between Lorcom Lane and Military Road, the current site of the Dorothy Hamm Middle School, is where four Black children entered Stratford Junior High School on Feb. 2, 1959, leading to the integration of Arlington Public Schools.

Less than a half a mile away is a building in Cherrydale that used to be a Drug Fair, where the second lunch counter sit-in in Northern Virginia was held. And the Walgreens at the corner of Langston Boulevard and North Kirkwood Road used to be a Hot Shoppes, which was the first restaurant chain anywhere in the South to desegregate, Embree explained.

The sit-ins in Arlington and across the South, by a relatively small group of young people, led to momentous changes in society that extended rights to Black Americans. In 1960, when Martin Luther King Jr. met with John F. Kennedy, who was running for president, Kennedy told King that it was the lunch counter sit-in movement that made him aware of the urgency of civil rights legislation.

In 1963, Kennedy submitted a bill to Congress that ultimately became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “one of the most far-reaching, seismic pieces of legislation in American history and a complete change in the public policy of this nation,” Embree said.

The policy changes that followed the sit-ins demonstrated the power of a small group of people to make a big difference.

“What’s remarkable about what the sit-inners did is that in a country of 180 million at the time, those who initiated the sit-ins scarcely numbered more than a dozen individuals often and, in some cases, even fewer than that,” Embree said.

In Greensboro, four young Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University engaged in the first sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. At the sit-in at the Drug Fair in Cherrydale, it was only six people who participated in the sit-in that turned violent when members of the American Nazi Party and local residents physically assaulted the sit-inners.

Embree said the impact of these individuals reminded him of a statement by the anthropologist Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Scott Taylor, an Arlington native and president of the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington, introduced Embree to the stage at Thursday night's event. He noted that the area near where Marymount University currently sits used to be known as Pelham Town, a small neighborhood of Black residents that consisted primarily of members of the Pelham family starting in the 1860s.

Taylor, who grew up in the Halls Hill neighborhood, recalled that his father worked part-time at the People's Drug store, where the first sit-in occurred on June 9, 1960. The sit-inners asked Taylor's father to join them, but he worried he would lose his job. "My dad had five mouths to feed" and "would have been out of a job" if he had joined them, he said.

In the audience at Thursday's event was Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, who participated in the sit-in at the Drug Fair in Cherrydale as an 18-year-old college student.

"This is my hero when it comes to white privilege," Taylor said of Mulholland. "This is what you do with it. She stuck her neck out there and had a lot of people angry at her. But she stood in there."

In his presentation, Embree emphasized that Arlington County was not a bastion of liberalism in the years leading up to the lunch counter sit-ins.

In 1920, when the area formally became known as Arlington County, the Ku Klux Klan "was part of the civic DNA," Embree said. KKK members sat on county commissions and had their own marching bands that joined Fourth of July parades well into the 1950s. The KKK even sponsored its own Little League teams. They held rallies, wearing their robes, in a field where the Ballston Quarter shopping center currently stands.

"Because Arlington was so heavily Klan controlled, the national leadership of the Klan chose North Arlington as the site of the first demonstration in the national capital area," he said.

In March 1922, KKK members paraded from Chain Bridge to Cherrydale and then to Clarendon. The procession preceded the infamous KKK march down Pennsylvania Avenue, when 35,000 Klan members converged on Washington, D.C, in 1925.

At the June 9, 1960 sit-in at the Cherrydale Drug Fair, the sit-inners were taunted and physically assaulted by local residents, including members of the American Nazi Party, which had its headquarters in Arlington. At 10 p.m., when the Drug Fair closed, the sit-inners were able to escape the large crowd of counter-protesters outside the front door, with the help of police and reporters who had converged on the store to cover the historic event.

The sit-ins would continue. And on June 22, 1960, only 13 days after the first sit-in at the Cherrydale Drug Fair, the owner of the Drug Fair chain ordered his company's stores to serve the people participating in the lunch counter sit-ins. This was followed by Woolworth’s announcing it would desegregate its lunch counters.

"It was almost like a wildfire, it was immediate," Embree said. "The walls of Jericho came down all at once. It spread very quickly to Alexandria, Fairfax County, Falls Church and all of Northern Virginia desegregated their lunch counters."