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"I REMEMBER PEOPLE STANDING AND STARING AT US LIKE WE were trouble makers and were trying to upset Charleston/' Harvey Gantt, a graduate of Burke High School in Charleston, recalled of the student-led sit-in on April 1,1960. "We at least got the attention of the community. We were feeling young and gifted and ready to tear down a broken social system. We felt like we were pioneers that day," Gantt said.1 Gantt was one of twenty-four Burke High School students who marched to S. H. Kress & Co., a segregated five-and-dime store on King Street in downtown Charleston. The students occupied nearly one-half of the lunch-counter seats, humming, singing freedom songs, and reciting prayers. The students maintained their composure as the manager of the store asked them to leave, white patrons cleared the premises, and bystanders circulated rumors of a bomb threat. Police arrested the students, charged them with trespassing, and put them in jail.2 By examining the effort to desegregate public facilities through the lens of the first sit-in in Charleston, this article will illustrate how a small, committed group of local high school students and teachers played an integral, though overlooked, role in the civil rights movement.
The above photograph of the Burke High School protesters was published in the Charleston News and Courier the day after the sit-in. This image contradicts civil rights movement historiography and collective memory, which typically limit student activism to college campuses. Historians and the American public often focus on the sit-ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, all of which emanated from institutions of higher education.3 When scholars discuss high school student activism, analysis is frequently cast in disparaging or paternalistic terms. "The greatest weakness of student protest is that it is conducted by students," quips Gerard J. DeGroot. "They are, almost by definition, young, reckless and prone to immaturity," he writes.4 As Vanessa Siddle Walker reasons in relation to the Caswell County Public Schools in North Carolina, students "are the ones around whom the entire story revolves, but they are not the significant players in the story." Students, rather, are the "recipients."5
In fact, high school students have...