In this video from December 14, 1961, ten black people enter the whites-only lunch room of the Trailways bus terminal in Albany. The group is led by Norma Lee Anderson, the wife of Dr. William G. Anderson, who was the president of the Albany Movement. Since the late summer, SNCC members Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon had been organizing students to hold sit-ins and kneel-ins. When they sit down, a white waitress who had been serving customers immediately leaves the lunch room. However, a black cook comes to the counter and serves the ten activists coffee. When one of them sits next to a white man at the counter, he moves. Sit-ins were some of the most dramatic nonviolent forms of protest that the Civil Rights Movement activists used. Television and newspaper images of neatly dressed young men and women enduring insults, being spat upon, and/or having food and drink poured on them--and not fighting back--emphasized the injustice of racism, and also how the reality of southern black people's lives differed from stereotypes and popular perceptions of them.

Freedom on Film is a component of the Civil Rights Digital Library, which received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

black and white: Kodak Safety Film

Accession number: 2001.35.10671

Identifier: Carnegie Museum of Art 2001.35.10671

Multimedia identifier: 19582.jpg

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