| Existing comment:
This was the scene at the Rose's Variety Store lunch counter in Portsmouth on February 16, 1960, minutes before a fight erupted. The lunch counter sit-in tactic spread almost immediately from Greensboro, North Carolina to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Hampton University students staged sit-ins at the WF Woolworth store in Hampton. Students in Norfolk sought meals at Bradshaw-Diehl's department store and at Woolworth's. The next week, 150 black students demonstrated at Rose's in Portsmouth and fistfights broke out between young blacks and whites. A crowd of 3,000 later gathered at the shopping center, and twenty-seven people were arrested. In the days following, lunch counters at some establishments were closed. Other store owners voluntarily desegregated their facilities, while others awaited court orders before doing so. Most, however, were forced by economic pressures to give in long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guaranteed equal access at public facilities. |