The 1960 Lunch Counter Sit-Ins: The Civil Rights Movement

A hush falls over the small diner. One man sits with his sandwich suspended halfway to his mouth as his jaw drops open in shock while another woman stands up so abruptly that her milkshake plunges off the table in an apparent attempt to evade the ensuing conflict. The four African-American college students sit at the Whites-Only lunch counter in Woolworth’s that February 1, 1960, appearing almost serene in their act of civil disobedience. The 1960 Lunch Counter Sit-Ins are one of the most famous, and undoubtedly effective, examples of civil disobedience in American history. In fact, the entire Civil Rights movement serves as a remarkable example of just how much power defiance possesses in the face of injustice. In a free society, civil disobedience …show more content…
Recently, advocates for the Second Amendment have valiantly used civil disobedience to take a stand for the right to bear arms. In 2014, Washington state gun-owners organized that largest gun rights rally in history to protest the gun sale restrictions under I-591 (Seattle Times, 2014). The 3,000 attendees, including Washington State Representatives Elizabeth Scott and Graham Hunt, publicly transferred their guns to each other in direct violation of background check provisions under I-591, buying and selling guns right in front of Law enforcement officers. This is a striking example of Americans applying their first amendment rights to the maintenance of their Second Amendment rights. Even more well-known to the general public than gun rights is civil disobedience in relation to personal privacy. NSA employee Edward Snowden made headlines worldwide when he defied government confidentiality laws to protect everyday citizens from losing the privacy promised to them under the Fourth Amendment (The New Yorker, 2013). In both these instances, civil disobedience was able to do something that blatant violence never could: open an honest dialogue about the state of our