"A Universal Effort"

All over the South. Negro students were on the march last week in a widespread, nonviolent protest the likes of which the U.S. had never seen. In the eleven weeks since four young Negro college students staged the first sitdown demonstration against segregation at the lunch counter of a Woolworth five-and-dime store in Greensboro, N.C. (TIME, Feb. 22 et seq.), the lunch-counter movement had spread through the moderate border states and the diehard Deep South like a dry-summer forest fire in a stiff breeze.

P: In Nashville, Tenn., some 3,500 students from Fisk University and other Negro schools marched on city hall in a stone-silent column half a mile long. Their grievance: the bombing that morning of the home of Lawyer Z. Alexander Looby, 62, one of the two Negro members of Nashville's city council, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and chief counsel for the 153 students who have been arrested in Nashville's rash of sit-in demonstrations. Said Councilman Looby after the bombing: "This won't stop me." Said redheaded Mayor Ben West to the well-behaved crowd: "As God is my helper, the law is going to be enforced in Nashville."

P: In Greensboro. N.C., 45 students were arrested on trespass charges for refusing to leave the lunch counter at an S. H. Kress & Co. five-and-dime. Among them: Ezell Blair Jr., 18, leader of the original sit-in incident.

P: In Chattanooga, Tenn., students held sit-in demonstrations at four five-and-dime lunch counters.

P: In Norfolk, a police court judge fined two Negro college students $15 apiece for distributing handbills protesting against lunch-counter segregation.

P: In Little Rock and Atlanta, placard-carrying students picketed downtown department stores, urging a boycott until lunch counters are open to both whites and Negroes.

P: In Savannah. Ga., to cope with store-picketing students. Mayor Lee Mingledorff asked the city council to pass an ordinance requiring licensing of pickets. "I don't especially care if it's constitutional or not," said he.

On both sides of Mason-Dixon. the sit-in campaign was gathering support from whites. In Beaumont. Texas, police arrested a white Baptist minister for leading 22 Negro college students in a lunch-counter demonstration. A dozen white students from the University of Minnesota arrived in Nashville to help the sit-in movement. At the request of Negro students, top labor chieftains, including A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany and United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, signed cards pledging themselves to boycott store chains that refuse to serve Negroes at lunch counters in the South.* Students from Harvard, M.I.T. and half a dozen other New England colleges met in Plainfield. Vt. to map a program for supporting the sit-in movement.

Showing how far and wide the movement has spread without any help from whites, 142 sit-in leaders from eleven Southern states and the District of Columbia met in Raleigh. N.C., voted to set up a Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, with headquarters in Atlanta. The delegates pledged themselves to accept jail before bail if arrested, heard the Rev. Martin Luther King, head of Atlanta's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, predict that willingness to go to jail "may well be the thing to awaken the dozing conscience of many of our white brothers." In Nashville, Fisk University's President Stephen J. Wright summed up the protest movement: "I see no cessation of this struggle in the foreseeable future. This is no student panty raid. It is a dedicated universal effort, and it has cemented the Negro community as it has never been cemented before."

* Not so Harry Truman, who told a Cornell University news conference that he thought the sit-ins were ''engineered by Communists." Later he said he had been misquoted, but a tape recording had him cold.

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