Black History Stories | The violence of getting served at Woolworth's
Friends,
Good Friday. When resistance has real consequences: real pain, real fear, death. It's an uncomfortable holiday.
I offer today the work of "Black History Stories", a facebook history project, telling stories we mostly don't know. Or don't know at this level of depth. I hope you will check them out.
-Liz
The Woolworth Counter
by Black History Stories
Ninety police officers watched through the windows while a mob burned cigarettes into Black students' skin inside a Jackson Woolworth's for three hours. They never went in.
Anne Moody, Memphis Norman, and Pearlena Lewis refused to leave their seats.
We all need to read this.
Pearlena Lewis took her watch off her wrist and placed it in Memphis Norman's hand. It was the morning of May 28, 1963, and the three of them, Pearlena, Memphis, and Anne Moody, had just walked through the rear entrance of the Woolworth's on Capitol Street in Jackson, Mississippi.
The plan was timed down to the second. Memphis would check the watch, wait for 11:14, signal the others to gather near the lunch counter, and at exactly 11:15 all three would sit down on stools reserved for white customers only.
They separated the moment they stepped inside. Each drifted to different counters, making small purchases, carrying receipts that proved they were paying customers, because the strategy sessions the week before had taught them that a receipt made it harder to charge someone with trespassing.
Nobody in the store knew what was about to happen. Fifteen minutes earlier, a group of picketers had started marching in front of J.C. Penney's up the street as a planned diversion to pull the police and the press to the wrong location.
Memphis checked the watch. 11:14.
He caught Pearlena's eye, then Anne's. The three of them moved toward the lunch counter and, seconds before 11:15, slid onto three stools at the whites-only section of a Woolworth's five-and-dime.
Pearlena Lewis was twenty years old, the president of the NAACP North Jackson Youth Council. She was the eldest of seven children, raised by a minister father who taught her that segregation wasn't something wrong with her but something wrong with the world around her.
She had told the adults in the movement exactly what she thought of their caution. "We were just tired of sitting around and listening to adults say, 'Let's try this, let's try that.' I thought we had waited long enough."
Anne Moody was twenty-two, from Centreville, Mississippi, the daughter of sharecroppers. Her professor John Salter, a sociology teacher at Tougaloo College, had asked her to be the spokesperson for the sit-in team, and she had nothing to lose.
Memphis Norman was twenty, a Tougaloo student who had not been deeply involved in the movement until this moment. The organization had struggled to find students willing to go to jail, and Memphis said yes.
The waitress walked past them twice before she realized what was happening. When she understood, she told them they would be served at the back counter, which was for Negroes, and they did not move.
She turned the lights off behind the counter. She and the other waitresses fled to the back of the store, abandoning every white customer sitting there.
For about an hour, nothing happened. The three students sat facing forward, waiting for food they knew would never come.
Then noon arrived. Students from Central High School, a nearby white school, poured through the doors on their lunch break and saw what was happening.
The taunting started, racial slurs, chanting, the word "communist" hurled over and over. A few of the white teenagers took the rope that had been used to block off the empty stools and fashioned one end into a hangman's noose, trying to loop it around the necks of the three students sitting there.
Anne kept her eyes forward, only glancing occasionally to see what was going on. At one point she noticed a man she recognized from a bus station encounter, drunk again today, pacing the floor with an open knife in his pocket.
She whispered to Memphis and Pearlena what she had seen. Memphis, still wearing Pearlena's watch on his wrist, suggested they pray.
They bowed their heads. And that was when the violence began.
A man rushed forward and threw Memphis off his stool. Another store employee slammed Anne against a counter, and Memphis hit the floor with blood running from the corners of his mouth.
The man who threw him down kept kicking him in the head. Anne Moody, down on her knees, saw it happening and would write later that if the attacker had been wearing hard-soled shoes instead of sneakers, the first kick probably would have killed Memphis.
The kicker was Benny Oliver, a former Jackson police officer. He beat Memphis Norman on the floor of a Woolworth's while actual police officers stood inside the store just a few feet away and did nothing.
An undercover officer eventually stepped in and arrested both Memphis and Oliver. But nobody helped Memphis first.
Pearlena was thrown from her seat to the ground. She fought her way back.
Anne was pulled from her stool. She clawed her way back up.
Outside, Joan Trumpauer, a white student from Tougaloo College, had been stationed as a lookout. She was supposed to stay outside, but when she saw what was happening through the windows, she walked in and sat down at the counter next to Anne Moody.
Joan Trumpauer was twenty-one, the great-granddaughter of slave owners, the daughter of a segregationist mother in Arlington, Virginia. Two years earlier, she had ridden a Freedom Ride into Jackson with Stokely Carmichael and spent two months in maximum security at Parchman Farm.
She was one of only two white students at Tougaloo College, the first white full-time student in the school's history. Her presence at that counter made the white mob even angrier.
Lois Chaffee, a white faculty member at Tougaloo, also came inside and sat down. John Salter, the sociology professor who had planned the demonstration alongside Medgar Evers, arrived and joined them at the counter.
The mob grew. A woman walked up holding a plastic bottle of mustard and squeezed it onto Anne Moody's black hair, then onto Pearlena's head.
Three teenage boys grabbed everything they could reach, salt, pepper, sugar, ketchup, and showered it over the women. Someone took spray paint from the store shelves and painted slurs on the backs of their clothes.
Salter was hit in the jaw with brass knuckles. Someone burned a cigarette into the back of his neck, and a mixture of pepper and water was thrown into his eyes.
Ed King, the white chaplain of Tougaloo College, stood in the crowd wearing his clerical collar with his pockets stuffed full of nickels and dimes for the pay phone. Every fifteen minutes he called Medgar Evers at the NAACP office to report what was happening.
Evers, listening from the command post on Lynch Street, considered calling the whole thing off. He sent word through King to the students at the counter.
"Medgar says it's OK if you want to leave," King whispered to the women. They said no.
Ninety police officers stood outside the Woolworth's, watching the entire scene through the plate-glass windows. Captain J.L. Ray refused to enter the building, claiming the store manager had to invite him in first.
The crowd threw ashtrays and glass figurines from the store's shelves. Someone smashed a sugar container and came at the students with the jagged glass edge.
Hot coffee was splashed in their faces. Anne Moody was dragged thirty feet across the floor by her hair.
She lost her shoes somewhere on that floor. She never got them back.
Walter Williams, a former Jackson State student body president who had been expelled for his activism, arrived and sat down at the counter. He was knocked unconscious.
Mercedes Wright, an NAACP activist, tried to shield Pearlena Lewis with her own body. Near the end, a high school student named Tom Beard and CORE staffer George Raymond also joined the sit-in, filling seats as others were dragged away.
The siege ended at two o'clock in the afternoon. Dr. A.D. Beittel, the sixty-three-year-old president of Tougaloo College, had contacted the Woolworth's national office and convinced them to order the store manager to close.
Beittel himself came downtown and led the battered students out through the front door. When Anne Moody stepped outside, she saw what the windows had hidden from the mob inside, about ninety white police officers standing in a line, watching.
The officers formed a single row to block the mob from following. But they allowed the crowd to throw everything they had collected at the group as they walked to the car.
Reverend Ed King drove them to the NAACP headquarters on Lynch Street in his station wagon. Anne Moody walked into a beauty shop across the street.
Her hair was stiff with dried mustard, ketchup, and sugar. She had no shoes on, her stockings stuck to her legs from the dried condiments, and she got her hair washed and straightened because for a Black woman in Mississippi in 1963, walking out of that beauty shop looking like herself was its own kind of resistance.
That evening, at least eight hundred people gathered at Pearl Street AME Church for a mass meeting. Medgar Evers stood before the crowd and told them the Woolworth sit-in was just the beginning.
That same night, someone threw a firebomb at Medgar Evers' home. His wife Myrlie put out the fire with a garden hose.
Fifteen days later, just after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway carrying a stack of t-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go." He was shot in the back by Byron De La Beckwith from a honeysuckle thicket a hundred and fifty feet away, and he was thirty-seven years old.
Fred Blackwell, a photographer for the Jackson Daily News, had been inside that Woolworth's the entire time. He climbed on top of the lunch counter to get his angle, and the photograph he took of John Salter, Joan Trumpauer, and Anne Moody covered in condiments while the white mob pressed in behind them became one of the most reproduced images of the civil rights movement.
He was the only still photographer inside. He called the people sitting at that counter the bravest people he had ever seen in his life.
"What they went through," he said, "pictures don't tell the story." He was right.
The photograph does not show Pearlena Lewis, who was sitting further down the counter. It does not show Memphis Norman, who by then had already been dragged off his stool, kicked until he bled from his mouth and nose, and arrested.
It does not show the watch on his wrist. The watch that started everything.
There were more than three hundred sit-ins during the civil rights movement. The Jackson Woolworth sit-in is still called the most violent of them all.
Bill Minor, the Mississippi correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune who was there that day, called it "the signature event of the protest movement in Jackson, the first one with real violence."
Two weeks after the sit-in, President Kennedy called for a national civil rights bill, and one year later the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.
Anne Moody published Coming of Age in Mississippi in 1968. She died in Gloster, Mississippi, on February 5, 2015, at seventy-four, cared for by her younger sister Adline.
Memphis Norman never became a household name. He died in 2005, at sixty-three, and the historical record has almost nothing to say about the rest of his life after that day.
Pearlena Lewis, the woman whose watch held the plan together, died in July 2001. Before Medgar Evers was killed, he had asked her to move to Jackson permanently because he believed in her spirit and her strength.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland is still alive. In 2025, a bill was introduced in Congress to award her a Congressional Gold Medal.
The Woolworth's on Capitol Street has been gone for decades. In 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary, a historical marker was placed where it once stood, the twelfth entry on the Mississippi Freedom Trail, a grassy space between a parking garage and a high-rise office building about two blocks west of the Governor's Mansion.
There is no mention of the watch on the marker. There is no record of whether it survived the beating, whether it was returned to Pearlena after Memphis was arrested, whether the hands were still moving when they pulled him off that floor.
But it was the watch that started everything. A young woman took it off her wrist and placed it in a young man's hand, and he held the time for all of them .
Did you know the story of Pearlena Lewis? This story for me adds a new definition of the purpose of prayer. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.
The Black History Stories Facebook group offers "Sharing real stories of Black history past, present & beyond." There is a wide variety of stories, almost all ones that I either didn't know, or, like this one today, I only knew the broad outlines.
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