Tampa's 1960 Lunch Counter Sit-Ins

On February 29, 1960, Black students from Middleton and Blake high schools began a series of daily, peaceful sit-ins at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth store in downtown Tampa.

According to Hillsborough County, about 40 students from George S. Middleton and Howard W. Blake High Schools, led by the NAACP Youth Council president and the NAACP state president, banded together to peacefully protest segregation. The county's marker inscription names the leaders as Clarence Fort, president of the NAACP Youth Council, and Reverend A. Leon Lowry, NAACP state president.

The rule they challenged was plain. A 2018 Hillsborough County account says it struck Fort and the teens as unfair that they could buy hundreds of dollars' worth of merchandise at the store, but not purchase a Coke and a hot dog at its lunch counter. The county places Tampa's stand among many taken at lunch counters throughout the South.

The county also sets the national frame: the sit-in movement of the 1960s began in February and gained momentum throughout the South, as Black students sat at segregated lunch counters at five-and-dime stores in non-violent demonstrations that played a significant role in the civil rights movement. Tampa's first sit-in came at the end of that same month.

NAACP Youth Council president Clarence Fort and the NAACP state president led the Tampa students, and the protests were planned in churches and the NAACP office near Central Avenue.

The City of Tampa states that downtown lunch counter sit-ins, a hallmark of the movement, were planned in the churches and the NAACP office near Central Avenue, the business heart of The Scrub, once Tampa's oldest and largest African American neighborhood. The same city page names Lowry and Helen Saunders among the leaders of Tampa's civil rights movement who worked with others to bring Martin Luther King Jr. to Tampa in 1961.

On the first morning, the county's 2018 account says, officers accompanied the Blake and Middleton high school students on their 20 minute march from St. Paul AME Church to the store, and police stopped traffic along the way so the students could cross roads. Fort, then president of Tampa's NAACP Youth Council, told the county there was fear, but that he had made up his mind it was something he had to do.

Among the Middleton students was Arthenia Joyner, then a 17 year old junior, a lawyer who later served in the Florida Senate and House. She told the county in 2018 that the day was the beginning of what she considered her calling. The City of Tampa's Soulwalk marker lists her among the participants, with the student council presidents of both schools.

Mayor Julian Lane assigned Tampa police to escort the students and then agreed to appoint a biracial committee to address their complaints.

Hillsborough County says Lane ordered the Tampa Police Department to escort the young protesters after the first day of the sit-ins, and that he then appointed a Bi-Racial Committee to quell racial tensions and encourage racial equality. The county's 2018 account adds that once the students were inside, policemen stood nearby as the teens took seats at the off-limits lunch counter, and it describes the then mayor as supportive.

The City of Tampa's Soulwalk marker tells the same sequence in its own words: Lane initially assigned police to escort the students from the store, and after about a week of demonstrations agreed to appoint a biracial committee to address the protesters' complaints.

Hillsborough County's own page gives two timings for the Tampa committee. Its summary says Lane appointed the committee days later, while the marker inscription it reproduces says after about a week. Both versions are shown in the comparison below.

The Hillsborough County and City of Tampa markers agree on the date, schools, leaders and outcome, but differ on the group's size, the store's street address and the committee's timing.

Sources for the Tampa comparison columns: the county marker page, the county's 2018 account and the city's Soulwalk marker. The county places the marker itself at the intersection of East Polk Street and North Franklin Street, which fits both the Polk Street and the Franklin Street descriptions; the 801 and 901 house numbers are left as each agency states them.

By September 1960 a total of 18 Tampa department stores had desegregated their lunch counters, and the city did it through nonviolent means.

That is the wording of Hillsborough County, which adds that unlike many other Southern cities during the 1960s, Tampa achieved this through nonviolent means. The City of Tampa's Soulwalk marker likewise says Tampa's lunch counters were integrated by September 1960 without the violence that marked desegregation efforts in many other parts of the country, and the county's inscription says the same of the lunch counters by September.

The change reached beyond the counters. Fort told Hillsborough County in 2018 that the successful sit-in helped spur economic change, as a short time later African Americans took jobs driving buses and working as clerks and secretaries. He called it a springboard to the job markets.

The next year Tampa hosted the movement's best known voice. On Nov. 19, 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at an NAACP rally at Fort Homer Hesterly Armory, now the Bryan Glazer Family Jewish Community Center, telling a gathering of 4,200 people, according to the former Tampa Times as cited by the county, that they were standing on the border of the promised land of integration.

A historical marker erected in 2018 stands outside the long closed Woolworth store, and the University of South Florida keeps the sit-in record in its Special Collections.

According to Hillsborough County, the Tampa Woolworth store closed in the early 1990s and is currently vacant, and the marker at East Polk Street and North Franklin Street was erected in 2018 by the Hillsborough County Historical Advisory Council and the Tampa Woolworth Project. The county's 2018 account announced a preview of the marker for Saturday, Feb. 24, with the permanent marker to be erected that summer. The city's Soulwalk marker program carries the same site, with a second side listing participants from both high schools.

The university's archive is the deepest record. USF News reports that USF history professors began recording oral histories of sit-in participants in the 1970s and collected the records of Robert Saunders, civil rights era NAACP president in Hillsborough County, and Cody Fowler, chairman of the Tampa Bi-racial Commission, papers and interviews that remain available to the public in USF's Special Collections. USF credits a 2017 master's project in its digital journalism program, built from those archives, with leading to the effort to place the marker.

The story has also reached the stage. USF says the Stageworks Theatre play When the Righteous Triumph was written by a USF faculty member, first ran in March 2023 at Stageworks Theatre, and returned to the Straz Center in March 2025 with private showings for students from more than 30 local schools.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading the Hillsborough County Woolworth marker page, its 2018 sit-in account and 1961 King visit page, the City of Tampa Soulwalk marker and Perry Harvey Sr. Park history, and the USF News report on its sit-in archives.