The Savannah Protest Movement was an American campaign led by civil rights activists to bring an end to the system of racial segregation in Savannah, Georgia. The movement began in 1960 and ended in 1963.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, African Americans in Savannah were subject to Jim Crow laws that enforced a strict system of racial segregation whereby they were not allowed to use many of the same facilities used by white people. However, African Americans attempted to push back against this system, and by the 1940s, the NAACP, under the leadership of Ralph Mark Gilbert, organized voter registration drives among the black population and negotiated agreements with moderate city officials to secure certain improvements for the community, including the hiring of African American police officers and greater investment in infrastructure, such as road repairs and the creation of a new high school. By the early 1960s, W. W. Law had become the president of the local NAACP chapter, with Hosea Williams serving as vice president and head of the local youth council.
On March 16, 1960, the movement began with a series of sit-ins conducted by several dozen student activists at segregated lunch counters throughout downtown Savannah, resulting in the arrest of three protestors. Segregated facilities were targeted for protest over the next several months, with activists engaging in marches, pickets, and other forms of direct action. Additionally, Williams helped mobilize the city's black voting bloc to push for change from the city government. By October 1961, a partial agreement was reached to desegregate some facilities in the city, though protesting continued to achieve complete desegregation. By mid-1963, Williams, who by this time had become affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), began to hold nighttime marches that saw hundreds of arrests and an instance of rioting that resulted in the burning of at least one building and the mobilization of the Georgia National Guard. Following this, white businessmen in the city agreed to a full desegregation of the city. Additionally, the city government under Mayor Malcolm Roderick Maclean agreed to rescind all remaining segregation ordinances effective October 1, bringing an end to the movement.
The Savannah movement is notable among protests of the civil rights movement for its length, its achievement of full desegregation, and for the general lack of violence when compared to other movements, such as the Birmingham campaign. Following the movement, Williams left Savannah to become a member of the SCLC national board, where he led a nationwide voter registration program during the 1960s. Meanwhile, in Savannah, Law served as NAACP local president until retiring in 1976. In 2016, the Georgia Historical Society installed a Georgia historical marker to commemorate the protest movement at the site of the former Levy's Department Store.
Background
Savannah prior to the civil rights movement
Following the Reconstruction era of the late 19th century, African Americans in the Southern United States faced economic and political persecution and racial discrimination under a system of laws known as Jim Crow laws. In Savannah, Georgia, one of the earliest examples of organized opposition to this discrimination came in the 1890s, when a boycott prevented the city's buses from becoming racially segregated. By the early 1900s, the city had numerous African American businesses and chapters of national African American organizations were founded prior to the end of World War I, including the NAACP, the National Negro Business League, and the National Urban League. However, the Interwar period, which included the Great Depression and several incidents of violent opposition from white Americans that included multiple lynchings, saw a decline in these organizations' activities. By 1940, according to historian Mark Newman, the NAACP in Georgia was "moribund". During the 1940s, several political developments occurred in Georgia at the state level that increased African Americans' electoral opportunities. This included a lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18, the abolition of the state's white primary system, and the elimination of the poll tax. Around this same time, activists in the state, especially consisting of black women, began to organize voter registration drives and pushed for the election of moderate politicians at the local level. Black civic leaders would then negotiate with these elected officials and were able to obtain concessions and agreements. Between 1940 and 1946, the number of African Americans registered to vote in the state rose from roughly 20,000 in 1940 to 135,000 in 1946. In Savannah, the local NAACP chapter was reinvigorated by Ralph Mark Gilbert, who worked with his wife, Eloria, on mass voter registration drives in the city. By 1946, half of Savannah's 45,000 African Americans were registered to vote, with the city boasting the highest percentage of African Americans registered to vote in the American South.
Civil rights movement in Savannah Gilbert served as the president of the Savannah NAACP chapter until 1950, when he was succeeded by W. W. Law, who, earlier that year, had become a member of the NAACP national board of directors. Law was a mentee of Gilbert's who had served on the NAACP Youth Council while in high school, during which time he served as the group's first president. As part of the youth council, he participated in activism such as protests against the segregation of Grayson Stadium. As a civil rights activist, Law was a believer in nonviolent resistance as an effective means to achieve social change, and he advocated against more violent tactics. In 1942, he enrolled at Georgia State College in Savannah, though he was drafted into military service after his first year. He later re-enrolled under the provisions of the G.I. Bill and graduated with a degree in biology, after which he found employment with the United States Post Office Department as a mail carrier. This job helped him in his work with the NAACP, as it kept him in close contact with people throughout the city. In a bit of a departure from Gilbert, Law focused primarily on continuing to maintain the local Savannah chapter and focused less on statewide activism and chapter-building.
Around the same time, Hosea Williams became another noted civil rights activist in Savannah. Williams was a graduate of Morris Brown College and Atlanta University, both in Atlanta, and had moved to Savannah in the 1950s to work as a chemist for the United States Department of Agriculture at Savannah State College. Williams believed that his hiring had been an example of tokenism, and this, coupled with an experience where one of his children was denied service at a lunch counter in the city, spurred him to become an activist for civil rights. By the early 1960s, he had become the vice president of the Savannah NAACP chapter under Law, and additionally, headed the local Youth Council. Another noted civil rights leader during this time was Eugene Gadsden, who served as the NAACP local chapter's legal counsel.
Sit-in movement
Under Law's administration, the NAACP chapter in Savannah continued to grow, with historian Clare Russell stating that this was due in part to "the lack of overt racial violence which meant that they could organize in relatively security". By 1959, Law began to promote more direct action to combat segregation. Starting in March 1960, the local NAACP chapter began to sponsor weekly meetings at local black churches to keep their members informed about ongoings in the broader civil rights movement. Around this time, many young activists in the city were interested in replicating the Greensboro sit-ins, a nonviolent protest that had begun in Greensboro, North Carolina, the previous month. As part of the protest, African American activists would go to segregated lunch counters and sit down at them, refusing to leave until they were either served, thrown out, or arrested. These initial protests in Greensboro sparked the larger sit-in movement, with activists in many cities throughout the American South employing similar nonviolent practices to integrate segregated spaces.
Course of the protests 1960 First sit-ins
The sit-in movement came to Savannah on March 16, 1960, when several black student activists, led by the NAACP Youth Council, first gathered at First African Baptist before leaving to downtown Savannah, where they performed sit-ins at eight businesses. In addition to the sit-ins, about 80 student protestors led a march through the streets to protest segregation. At the Azalea Room, a lunch counter inside the Levy's Department Store, Carolyn Quilloin, Joan Tyson, and Ernest Robinson were arrested after they continued to try to order after the owner demanded that they leave. In jail, the arrested proceeded to sing "We Shall Overcome". At the time of the sit-ins, Robinson had written part of Psalm 23 on his palm, and in a later interview with the Savannah Morning News, Coleman stated, "That verse uplifted us. We were very familiar with what had happened to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old student who was killed in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a White girl across the street. While we thought that we were safe in Savannah, we knew that anything could happen". These three students, all members of the NAACP Youth Council, were convicted under an anti-trespassing state law and sentenced to either five months in jail or a $100 fine (equivalent to $ in 2021). In addition to Levy's Department Store, other restaurants targeted by the sit-ins included Anton's Restaurant, franchises of Krystal and Morrison's Cafeteria, and the lunch counters inside of the downtown Woolworth's and S. H. Kress & Co. Alongside the Atlanta sit-ins, which began one day earlier, these marked some of the first sit-ins in the state.
Boycott and further protests
On the same day as the sit-ins, the local NAACP announced a boycott of downtown stores. Black civic leaders announced that the boycotts would target segregated businesses and would continue until these businesses were desegregated. In addition to this, they also demanded the hiring of black workers at levels above menial positions, the desegregation of public drinking fountains and restrooms, and the use of courtesy titles, such as Mr., Mrs., and Miss, instead of simply "boy" or "girl", when referring to African Americans. On March 17, the boycott was temporarily placed on hold as Law and several other activists in Savannah traveled to Sylvania to participate in a hearing of the Sibley Commission, but on March 20, the first mass meeting of the protest movement was held at Bolton Street Baptist Church on West Broad Street. Members at the meeting voted unanimously to officially institute a boycott against downtown businesses, and Law, speaking to an audience of about 1,000 people, stated that the boycotts would continue until integration was achieved. Local churches would serve as regular meeting spots for the duration of the protest, commonly held at either Bolton Street Baptist or St. Philip AME Church.