"It Was the Wrong Time, and They Just Weren't Ready": Direct-Action Protest in Pine Bluff, 1963

Abstract

WHETHER BY DESIGN OR FATE, the first sit-in conducted by the Pine Bluff Student Movement (PBSM) occurred on February 1, 1963, the first day of Black History Month, established thirty-seven years earlier, as well as the third anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina, student sit-in. Thirteen students of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College (AM&N) entered the F. W. Woolworth store in downtown Pine Bluff a little after 2:00 P.M., carrying textbooks and dressed in their Sunday best. As soon as the students sat down at the lunch counter, a waitress-apparently by prior arrangement-turned off the lights, closing the counter for business. For more than two hours, the thirteen students silently sat in the semi-darkness as word spread through downtown that a sit-in was in progress. Curious onlookers filed into the Woolworth to watch. After being identified by the police as the leader of the PBSM, Robert Whitfield, a AM&N junior from Little Rock, was approached by store manager T. W. Harper and asked into Harper's office for a private meeting. As the other students continued the demonstration, Whitfield spoke with Harper for more than one hour, no doubt trying to reach an amicable compromise.1 At 5:30 P.M., when Harper announced the store was closing more than two hours early, the A&MN students quietly rose from the lunch counter and left the store. This sit-in, the first in Pine Bluff history, broke a number of barriers. The city's black community was large and vigorous but existed apart from white institutions. Situated in the heart of the black section of Pine Bluff, the campus of AM&N and its students were largely self-sufficient. More generally, black entrepreneurs-operating everything from financial institutions to eateries and beauty shops-offered a range of services unavailable to the black citizenry via most whiteowned establishments in the city. The sit-in, however, bridged this divide. The city's daily newspaper, the Pine Bluff Commercial, placed a photograph of three unidentified protesters-two men and one woman-on its front page. Prior to the publication of the photograph, pictures of African Americans had rarely appeared on the front page of the Commercial. Certainly, pictures of black ministers, university officials, and community leaders had appeared, but they were buried deep within the newspaper. Most importantly, prior to the student sit-ins, news relating to the black community had not appeared on the paper's front page. Instead, the Commercial largely confined its coverage to basketball games between historically black colleges, a segregated obituary column entitled "Negro Deaths," and infrequent, token articles about presumably good race relations. Henceforth, stories associated with the AM&N sitins would regularly appear on the front page. Over the course of a few months, a small group of student activists changed the face of race relations in their community. There is much more to the story of Arkansas during the civil rights movement than Little Rock alone, but the events in 1957 have long overshadowed other episodes that changed lives and entire communities. The painful birth of the PBSM is one such episode. Newspapers across the world did not headline the events in Pine Bluff. The President did not federalize troops to ensure PBSM members could continue their education at AM&N. But examining events that led to the expulsion of fifteen students, the bitter split within the black community over AM&N chancellor Lawrence A. Davis's decision to oust them, and the consequences individual students faced is instructive, for it suggests the inadequacy of narratives that manage to portray Arkansas's civil right movement as a success story-largely by cutting that story short at the reopening of Little Rock high schools in 1959.2 Pine Bluff held an important place in Arkansas's civil rights history. Two African-American attorneys based there, W. II. …