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Group Asks Protest Support
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Wednesday, February 20, 1960.
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A North Carolina church group Friday called for support of Negroes in their demand for equal service at lunch counters in stores.
The Human Relations Committee of the North Carolina Council of Churches, meeting in Raleigh, said it recognized "the democratic and moral right of Negroes to equality of service at the lunch counters of stores serving the public."
The statement issued by the committee urged "our fellow citizens, and especially our Christian brethren, to unite with us in openly and firmly defending this basic human right."
The statement was signed by the co-chairman of the committee Dr. H. Shelton Smith, professor of American religious thought at Duke University in Durham; and the Rev. W. R. Grigg, secretary of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention's Department of Interracial Cooperation.
Meanwhile, there was relative quiet on the wide front sketched out in the last two weeks by Negro demonstrators, many of them college students, protesting segregated eating facilities.
Students continued to picket several Raleigh variety and drug stores in protest against being excluded from lunch counters which traditionally serve only whites.
YALE STUDENTS PICKET WOOLWORTH STORES
NEW HAVEN, Conn., Feb. 19 (AP) — Eight Yale students today picketed a Woolworth store in what they called a demonstration against racial segregation in the South.
Police first interfered with the demonstration but then, after some of the students talked with Mayor Richard C. Lee, let them go ahead.
Leaflets passed out by the students said:
"We are attempting to communicate to others that Woolworth's branches in Greensboro, Raleigh, Fayetteville and Durham, N.C., like many other Southern stores, treat their Negro customers undemocratically and deny to them the same seated meal service provided to white people."