Thursday, Aug. 29, 1963: A stand against whites-only hamburgers
Posted on October 9th, 2005 – 8:20 PMBy Ben Welter
On Aug. 28, 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. One day later, the Minneapolis Star told the story of a 13-year-old Minneapolis girl who was arrested earlier that month in Pine Bluff, Ark. Jean Webb’s crime: She would not leave a McDonald’s stand that had refused to sell her a hamburger.
Forty-two years later, Jean still calls Minneapolis home. She talks about her arrest in an interview that follows the original story.
City Girl, 13, Gets 30 Days
in Jail for Arkansas Sit-in
By HERM SITTARD
Minneapolis Star Staff Writer
A 13-year-old Minneapolis girl may have to interrupt her studies at Bryant Junior High School next month to stand trial in Arkansas for trying to buy a hamburger at a McDonald Hamburger stand there.
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Jean Webb, 13, was fingerprinted and released on $1,500 bond. |
Jean Webb, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. McClinton Webb, 3244 Clinton Av. S., was arrested Aug. 5 by police at Pine Bluff, Ark., and spent two nights in a jail cell with 10 other teen-age girls before she was taken to Municipal Court.
The charge read to her in court was “refusing to leave a public place at the request of the management.” She pleaded not guilty, was tried by the municipal judge eight days later and sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.
She was released on bond and must appear in circuit court at Pine Bluff later to appeal the sentence. She returned here last week.
Jean described her experience today. She went to Pine Bluff July 1 with her mother, brother and two sisters to visit their grandmother, Mrs. Will R. Wright.
“The Negroes there,” Jean said today, “had been negotiating with McDonald’s a long time because they could not buy hamburgers there. The manager, Robert Knight, told the Negroes he’d open his stand to them one day from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. But when the date came, he didn’t open the stand.
“On August 5th, I was among 20 teenagers who went to his stand and tried to order. The manager asked us politely to leave.”
She said they sat down at a table. “The assistant chief of police came with the paddy wagon then, and asked us to leave.
“We didn’t leave; so he said ‘you’re under arrest’ and took our names and addresses, and everybody got into the wagon and drove to jail.
“A model from New York who sat with us – a white lady – didn’t know what was happening and she was arrested too. The policeman took our purses and they put 11 of us in a jail cell with two bunks in it.
“They put the 10 boys in one cell on the first floor.
“Six of us got out of jail August 7, because a Negro offered us bail money. The others had to stay in jail till Aug. 9.
“The judge asked us all to stand. He made a speech about him being the citizen judge of Pine Bluff. Then he said, ‘I sentence you to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.’
“The white lady got the same sentence.”
While they were in jail, Jean said, they were taken to a room upstairs for photographs.
“They hung some numbers around our necks and took our pictures. We were fingerprinted, too.”
Each of the prisoners was released on $1,500 bond.
Jean enters the eighth grade at Bryant Junior High School next Wednesday.
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| Aug. 28, 1963: King shares his dream. (Getty Images) |
September 2005 update: Jean Webb is now Jean Webb Bradford, 55, an assistant principal at South High in Minneapolis. Her memories of Pine Bluff are clear.
The sit-in at McDonald’s was an event planned by leaders of the NAACP and African-American churches in Pine Bluff. Jean Webb’s grandfather was part of a group that organized sit-ins in movie theaters and parks that summer.
Jean wasn’t planning to get involved in acts of civil disobedience when she headed south. “I just went down there with my younger sister to visit my grandparents,” she said. “My mother had instructed me not to get involved because of the danger.”
Jean became interested in the civil rights movement in Pine Bluff through her grandfather. She joined a group of young people receiving training in nonviolent protest. The group visited the McDonald’s twice and was refused service.
“They turned the hydrants on us,” Jean said. “Another time dogs were released. I didn’t get bit, but some did.”
The group’s leaders then met with restaurant managers and reached the compromise described in the article: Blacks would be served if they visited the store at certain times. On Aug. 5, about 20 people ranging in age from 13 to about 30 arrived at one of the designated times and were refused entry. “We couldn’t get in,” Jean said. “They locked the doors and called police.”
The actress mentioned in the article was nobody famous – “just a regular person” — and wasn’t part of the group. “She was just trying to get a sandwich. She couldn’t believe that this could happen in America.” The woman talked to store management, pressing the group’s cause, and ended up getting arrested herself.
The group sat outside the restaurant, singing civil rights songs. The police arrived and took everyone to jail. They were placed in two cells, according to sex. The white actress was housed in a third cell. The conditions were primitive: no food, and just a hole in the floor for a toilet. Supporters brought them food during their three days in jail.
“I don’t remember feeling any fear,” Jean said of the McDonald’s sit-in. “We were doing something important and it needed to happen. I felt more fear when my mother found out about it.” Her mother was not pleased to hear of the arrest. After her release, Jean barely had time to eat and get cleaned up at her grandfather’s house. “Me and my sister had to leave immediately. We were put on a train [to Minneapolis] that very afternoon.”
Jean describes herself as a typical kid growing up in Minneapolis, “taking piano lessons, ice skating.” She ran for student council president in sixth grade. She doesn’t recall encountering racism in those years, with one exception. She met with a white counselor at Central High to discuss college options and was asked why she would want to go to college. Her academic skills weren’t in question; she was a solid B student. He refused to give her any information about colleges. Later, she and her mother returned to the school and pressed the issue with the counselor, and he finally gave her the material. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Augsburg College and a master’s in social work at Atlanta University of Social Work. She worked for Hennepin County for 14 years before joining the Minneapolis school system in 1990.
Not many colleagues or students at South High know of her arrest in Pine Bluff. Occasionally she speaks to classes studying the civil rights movement. Students are shocked to hear how she was treated. “They can’t believe it,” Jean said. “They say, ‘Ms. Webb, why didn’t you fight back?” She explains how nonviolence was an effective tool of the civil-rights movement.
What about that 30-day sentence? Jean never served it. She’s not certain what happened, but she suspects that a presidential order threw out convictions related to nonviolent civil-rights protests. At any rate, her mother wouldn’t allow her to return to Arkansas. Jean never visited Pine Bluff again until she was an adult.
5 Responses to "Thursday, Aug. 29, 1963: A stand against whites-only hamburgers"
I am a white female raised in Minnesota who lived in Arkansas from 1984 through 1988 as a member of a household in the upper-middle class economic bracket. I saw firsthand that racism was still present at that time, and very likely still occurs.
After going out on a medical leave from a job in which I had become very good friends with the switchboard operator whose station was next to mine (I was a secretary to middle management.), I invited her to come to my home because I missed her and we needed to catch up on the events in each other’s lives since I’d had to leave my job. At first she vehemently refused to visit me, saying, “Your neighbors won’t talk to you if you have me come to your house.” I responded by telling her she was my friend and I didn’t care if they talked to me or not, which was the truth. Although I liked my neighbors, my desire to be their friend was much less than my desire to remain being her fried.
I was very happy when she reluctantly agreed to visit me after work one day. We had a great time catching up over coffee.
When she left, though, she said she would not come to my house to visit me again. She did not want to put me in a “bad position” with my neighbors. However, she extended an invitation for me to visit with her and her family at their home in a neighboring small town, solely occupied by African Americans. I responded with surprise, parroting her initial response back to her that her neighbors won’t talk to her anymore if I, a white woman, visits at her home. She responded, “They aren’t like that.”, so in the future, our visits were always at her home.
The public school district in which I lived required,as late as in the Fall of 1972, that high school students had to purchase the text books used for their classes. My neighbor told me what that was to accomplish, and did, in fact accomplish: It eliminated the “poor white trash” and “n……” from attending high school.
When I left Arkansas in 1988 and moved back to Minnesota (due to a change in marital status), I know for a fact there were Black families still literaly living in tar paper shacks with dirt floors, no electricity, and no plumbing. Still, at least one of the sons in a family living in those conditions was attending high school. Just getting to school in a clean and presentable manner was a challenge for this young person. Would any of the white children then (my own, included) or now make such an effort? I don’t think so.
My children, both boys, the youngest being in the third grade and the oldest having just graduated high school, learned some very valuable life lessons about prejudice due to the exposure to it during the four years we lived in southern Arkasas.
Having worked for a short time in the Deputy Prosecuting Attorney’s office in the area, I could tell you some pretty hair-raising incidences coming out of the criminal justice system in that area in regard to racial inequality.
Suffice it to say, I don’t know that I would live in the South if I were Black, even in the current time. The climate in the 80″s hadn’t changed that much from the ’60’s. The prejudice was/is only more subtle and therefore, it was/is more difficult to prosecute whites for the ongoing prejudice that was/is still very prevalent. I applaud any member of a minority group that finds the courage to assert their rights as Americans. They are still fighting the battle today.
Pretty damning indictment of the Governor Clinton years in Arkansas.
This is anecdotal and not an indictment. I am sure things improved under his years. Prejudice exists everywhere and amongst all people. It isn’t one persons fault. Nor one race.
My personal experience is that every overt act of racism I have witnessed has come from a minority. I have seen a black man attack a man on a bus for being Jewish. I have heard the words “honkey” and “white bitch” more times than I care to remember. I have seen female reporters attacked for being white. I have seen African Americans attack other blacks for coming from Africa recently.
Yes, prejudice and discrimination exist. But, it isn’t just against black people. Often times it is committed by black people. But, no matter. It is wrong whenever it happens. I just wish we would say that to everyone. Right now racism is a stick we beat white people with while black people own slaves in Africa.
I was fortunate to grow up in Minnesota and be taught the basic fundamentals of decency and the golden rule. I have lived in other parts of the country. Most of us don’t realize what a progressive state this was, and I hope, will continue to be. But, we need honest courageous talks about race and society.
(No relation to the other Bruce Wendland) I grew up in rural Minnesota in the 1950’s and knew very little about race relations. We travelled through part of the south in the early 1950’s and were thrown out of a black restaurant because we were white. My parents were stunned as they were totally unaware of laws in the southern states. I also remember coming to Mpls in the early 1960’s and my mom telling us we wouldn’t shop at Woolworths because they wouldn’t serve blacks down south. She was unaware that none of major stores down south served blacks at their lunch counters. Where as I grew up with little idea on how to relate to blacks or other minorities, I was raised to treat all people fairly and equally and I hope I carry that out daily.
Kathie Hubbard, thank you for sharing such an interesting story. I am 47 years old and still remember the first time I was ever called the N word to my face. It was at Edison High School back in the mid 70’s. My mother was born in Texas back in 1923 and up until a few years ago didn’t realize that Blacks could shop at Saks and Nordstroms. She also thought my working in an office meant I was mopping office floors. I’ve definitely seen racism come from all races and I don’t think that will change in my lifetime.
