Kent Council on Human Affairs Pickets Downtown Store in April 1960 to Support Southern Sit-In Movement

More than sixty years ago this commercial building, now housing a bookstore, café, record store, and barber shop, welcomed customers to Kent’s downtown location of the mass merchandise chain store, W.T. Grant Co. In 1960 chain stores like W.T. Grant and Woolworth’s had become the newest battlefield in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement as Southern college students started protesting segregated lunch counters in southern stores. Over two days in April 1960, local Kent State University students (African American and white) conducted a nonviolent protest in front of this W.T. Grant store in solidarity with the Southern protest movement to try to persuade Grant’s corporate owners to desegregate their Southern lunch counters. 

In 1960, this commercial building located at 124 East Main Street boasted a branch of W.T. Grant Co., a mass merchandise chain store with 864 stores throughout the nation located in downtown areas and shopping centers. According to the company’s 1960 Annual Report, the W.T. Grant Co. considered itself the “Complete Family Store in non-food lines” where Americans could buy products ranging from clothing for every family member, televisions, bed sheets, watches, and educational toys. On Friday April 22 and Saturday April 23, 1960, Kent’s W.T. Grant store was the site of a protest launched by the Kent Council on Human Affairs in support of the Southern Civil Rights Movement’s sit-in protests against segregated lunch counters in chain stores like W.T. Grant and Woolworth’s.

Two months earlier in February 1960, four African American college students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in Greensboro kicked off the southern sit in movement as they took their seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to leave without being served like the white customers. This nonviolent, direct action protest movement to integrate lunch counters spread rapidly throughout the South as African American college students and youth challenged racial inequality despite physical harassment.

As the Southern sit in movement gained national attention college students in Northern states began to pay attention. On April 13, 1960, the Student Council at Kent State University endorsed a resolution brought by the Kent Council of Human Affairs supporting and sympathizing with

"our collegiate brothers in the South in their sit-down strikes to integrate the lunch counters that are now segregated.”¹

The Kent Council of Human Affairs had been founded in the fall of 1959 as a student and Kent community member organization which included both African American and white college students who were interested in the ongoing Civil Rights movement. Only a week later, on Thursday, April 21, the Kent Council on Human Affairs began picketing the local Woolworth’s store in Kent located in the Kent Plaza on South Water Street.

The next day on Friday, April 23, the Kent Council on Human Affairs relocated its protests sympathizing with the Southern sit ins to downtown Kent in front of the W.T. Grant store. About 50 Kent State students, Black and white carried signs in front of the W.T. Grant store for three hours on Friday and returned on Saturday for three more hours of protesting. The protestors made sure to keep to a narrow profile on the sidewalk so they would not block passersby. One leader of the Kent Council on Human Affairs told the local press,

"The aims of our demonstrations are to influence this local store to persuade its national office into prohibiting this alarming practice and to show support for Negroes seeking their rights guaranteed by the constitution."²

In the aftermath of the Kent Council on Human Affairs’ solidarity protests in front of Kent’s chain stores, the Council decided to send a few members to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend a Conference on Human Rights which would discuss Northern support for the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. Less than a month later, on May 17, the 6^th year anniversary of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Kent Council on Human Affairs participated in and sponsored a student-faculty discussion of racism and discrimination in the North including segregation in the city of Kent itself that drew about 500 attendees to the Kent State campus.

1. Martin, Larry. "SC Supports Southern Lunch-Counter Strikes." The Daily Kent Stater (Kent) April 14th 1960. , 1-1.
2. Lewis, Jack. "KSU Students Will Continue Sympathy Strikes of Stores." The Daily Kent Stater (Kent) April 26th 1960. , 1-1.
3. "Woolworth Picketing Set in Kent." Evening Record-Courier Tribune (Kent) April 21st 1960. , 3-3.
4. "PIckets Move from Plaza to Grant Store." Evening Record-Courier Tribune (Kent) April 23rd 1960. , 3-3.
5. Lewis, Jack . "Pickets Defy Owner's Warning: Human Affairs Council to Picket Plaza Store." The Daily Kent Stater (Kent) April 28th 1960. , 1-1.
6. Byrd, R Allan. "Human Affairs Council Studies Kent Problems." The Daily Kent Stater (Kent) April 29th 1960. , 1-2.
7. "Race Problem Localized." The Daily Kent Stater (Kent) May 19th 1960. , 2-2.
8. W.T. Grant Company Annual Report (1960), Internet Archives. April 3rd 1961. Accessed April 21st 2022. https://archive.org/details/wtgrantcoannualreports/wtgrant1960/page/nundefined/mode/1up.
9. Grace, Thomas M.. Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties. Amherst, Massachusetts. University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.
10. Holt, Thomas C. . The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights. New York, NY. Oxford University Press, 2021.
11. Parker, Traci. Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill, NC. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.