Savannah sit-ins at Levy’s Department Store led to citywide desegregation

On 16 March 1960, Black students led by the NAACP Youth Council walked into eight stores along Broughton Street and sat down at the whites-only lunch counters. In this building, which was then Levy's Department Store, three students named Carolyn Quilloin, Ernest Robinson and Joan Tyson went upstairs to the Azalea Room tea room and refused to leave. Police arrested all three.

The arrests triggered an immediate response from local civil rights leaders. Westley Wallace Law, a local postman who led the Savannah branch of the NAACP, worked with Hosea Williams and Eugene Gadsden to organize a boycott of Broughton Street merchants. Law had been trained in the local movement by Ralph Mark Gilbert, the pastor of First African Baptist Church who rebuilt the local NAACP chapter in the 1940s.

The boycott emptied Broughton Street, which was the main shopping district in the city. Alongside the economic pressure, organizers ran voter registration drives that successfully helped elect a moderate city government under Mayor Malcolm Maclean.

The sit-ins and the boycott continued for over a year. In October 1961, the city repealed the ordinance that required segregated lunch counters. The organizers kept the boycott going for another two years until every municipal facility in Savannah was desegregated in October 1963.

This campaign achieved full desegregation eight months before the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. In 1964, Martin Luther King called Savannah the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon line.