Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins

[Ian Livingston]

The first major sit-down strike was at the Firestone rubber plant in
Akron, OH, 1936. That was a strike against the all usual behaviors of
unrestricted corporate scorn for workers.

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:47 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In a little book called "The Voices of Negro Protest in America'
> by one Haywood Burns (w intro by john Hope Franklin), OUP
> 1963........
>
> a footnote cites the story in 17th Century slave records of 'Tony' who
> tried to carry out non-participation to the max, it seems....and that in
> 1875
> a Negro staged a one-man sit-in at the Metropolitan Opera Hous in NYC..
>
> & The Congress of Racial Equality was started with a sit-in at a Chicago
> restaurant in 1942.....and in 1958 the Okla City NAACP staged sit-ins in
> Okla City but the major difference between all of these and sit-in of the
> Greensboro Four in Feb 1960 (in a Woolworth's) is that the sit-ins grew
> in number in 1960........
>
> 21 showed up the next day in Greensboro then some terrif stats on the growth
> in estimated numbers and confirmed cities and states over the next months
> and years...
> as participants---which grew to include mostly white Northerners in
> solidarity in the North (as well as
> Southern involvement as we know)  took on being arrested and much worse of
> course...
>
> This old book is very interesting in another way: sez the results are
> unclear because
> lotsa cases were still in the courts with the Supremes only affirming to
> that point
> one 'free speeech' case 8-1 to that point in time.....



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant