Morgan State honors its civil rights sit-in pioneers - The Washington Post: In 1953, seven years before the formal launch of the sit-in movement, students from Morgan State College were lining up daily at the lunch counter of Read’s drugstore. There, some manager or anxious waitress would recite the Maryland trespassing statute and ask them to leave.
Scholars at the historically black university believe that they were the first students in the nation to organize sit-ins for desegregation. This week, their role in the nation’s civil rights movement was finally honored.
“Please rise,” said Larry Gibson, a University of Maryland law professor, addressing a standing-room-only crowd in Morgan State’s movie theater Thursday afternoon. Half of the audience took to its feet: nearly 200 alumni of what is now Morgan State University, the human legacy of a 15-year campaign of sit-ins, picketing and arrests that transformed a segregated Baltimore.
