Tampa's 1960 Lunch Counter Sit-Ins — Tampa, Florida

On Feb. 29, 1960, Black high school students took seats at the whites-only lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworth store in downtown Tampa. According to Hillsborough County, they came from George S. Middleton and Howard W. Blake high schools and were led by Clarence Fort, president of the NAACP Youth Council, and Rev. A. Leon Lowry, the NAACP's state president. Their protest was a sit-in: they occupied the counter peacefully and waited to be served.

The rule they challenged was plain. A 2018 Hillsborough County account explains that Black customers could spend hundreds of dollars on merchandise at the Woolworth store but could not buy a Coke and a hot dog at its counter. Accounts of the group's size differ: the County marker and the City of Tampa marker say about 40 students took part, while the 2018 County account and a 2025 USF News report say about 50.

The ground had shifted in Tampa before 1960. Fox 13 reports that in 1955 the city's fast-growing suburbs were restricted to whites and Black residents could not eat out alongside white diners, but that Gov. LeRoy Collins, inaugurated in January 1955, opened lines to Black leaders in Florida, to the point of taking telephone calls from Tampa civil rights lawyer Francisco Rodriguez. Hillsborough County notes that the wider sit-in movement began in February 1960 and spread across the South as Black students sat at segregated five-and-dime counters, and Tampa joined it within weeks.

Clarence Fort was a young Tampa barber who served as Lowry's right hand at the NAACP Youth Council. Fox 13, in a Feb. 19, 2025 report, says Fort watched the February 1960 sit-ins in North Carolina and began planning similar protests in Tampa, recruiting students from Blake and Middleton, the city's two Black high schools. Lowry and Francisco Rodriguez, a Tampa lawyer who had filed a series of lawsuits against Jim Crow laws, advised and trained the students.

The planning happened in the Central Avenue community. The City of Tampa states that the downtown lunch counter sit-ins were organized in the churches and the NAACP office near Central Avenue. On the first morning, Fox 13 reports, the students gathered at historic St. Paul A.M.E. Church and walked to the Woolworth on Franklin Street. Hillsborough County describes a 20-minute march, with officers accompanying the Blake and Middleton students and police stopping traffic so they could cross.

Among the Middleton students was Arthenia Joyner, then a 17-year-old junior, 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.

No one served the students on Feb. 29, and they left at the end of the day, according to Fox 13. They returned through the first week of March. The next day a larger group sat in at Woolworth and at the nearby W.T. Grant and Kress stores, USF News reports, and Tampa police went with them.

That police presence came from the top. Hillsborough County says Mayor Julian Lane ordered the Tampa Police Department to escort the young protesters after the first day, and USF News says Lane had concluded it was time to desegregate the lunch counters and wanted it done peacefully. Hillsborough County's 2018 account adds that officers stood nearby inside the store as the teens took the off-limits seats.

The timing of Tampa's biracial committee is where accounts diverge. Fox 13 reports that Lane had already appointed black and white community leaders to a biracial committee before Christmas of 1959, including attorney Cody Fowler, who had led the American Bar Association, and Rev. Lowry. The County's marker page says Lane appointed a Bi-Racial Committee days after the sit-ins began, and the inscription says after about a week.

The breakthrough was a negotiation. According to Fox 13 and USF News, the biracial committee and the mayor offered a deal: if the students called off the demonstrations, the committee would work with Tampa merchants to open the counters. The students trusted the mayor and stood down, and talks with the stores followed.

The result, in the County's words, was that by September 1960 a total of 18 department stores in Tampa had desegregated lunch counters, and unlike many other Southern cities, 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 elsewhere.

The Tampa model traveled. Fox 13 reports that Gov. LeRoy Collins created a statewide bi-racial committee modeled after the one in Tampa. Fort later told Hillsborough County that the sit-in was a springboard to the job market, as Black residents soon took jobs driving buses and working as clerks and secretaries. The following year, on Nov. 19, 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed 4,200 people at an NAACP rally at Tampa's Fort Homer Hesterly Armory.

The store itself closed in the early 1990s and stands vacant, according to Hillsborough County. A historical marker went up outside it in 2018, erected by the Hillsborough County Historical Advisory Council and the Tampa Woolworth Project at East Polk and North Franklin streets, after a preview ceremony on Feb. 24, 2018. USF News credits a 2017 University of South Florida digital journalism master's project, built from USF archives, with leading to the marker. The marker is also part of the City of Tampa's Soulwalk trail, and its second side lists student participants.

The University of South Florida has preserved much of the record. USF News reports that USF history professors began recording participants' oral histories in the 1970s and collected the papers of Robert Saunders, the Hillsborough County NAACP president of that era, and of biracial committee chairman Cody Fowler, which remain in USF Special Collections.

The story has also reached the stage. Stageworks Theatre's play When the Righteous Triumph, written by a USF English faculty member, first ran at Stageworks in March 2023. A fundraising committee that included former U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, Fowler's grandson, and former Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio raised about $500,000, funding public performances in the Straz Center's Jaeb Theater on March 6 to 9, 2025, along with private showings for students from more than 30 local schools.