Post About “Macalester Students Picket Jim Crow Policies, 1961”
This text is part of a collection of student work from the Fall 2017 class HIST 294-04/AMST 294-01, Public History: African American Life — Past, Present and Future. Students selected, described, and analyzed items from the Macalester Archives pertaining to Black history. The entire class collection can be found here.
On a winter night in 1961, a large group of Macalester students picketed at theaters in downtown Saint Paul. They were calling for a boycott of the Paramount theater chain, because Paramount segregated their affiliated theaters in the South. An article about the demonstration ran in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press on Monday, February 13, 1961. Written by the paper’s staff writer, Gene Malott, it was headlined, “INTEGRATION ISSUE, 3 Groups Picket Loop Theaters.” It ran on the front page, mostly above the fold. The three groups listed were: “about 65 Macalester College students” demonstrating at two theaters, “four members of the National Society for the Preservation of the White Race” (NSPWR), and two men passing out NSPWR literature who disavowed affiliation with either group, but who said “they just ‘disliked communism.’”
The story was accompanied by a photograph of the picketers on an interior page. The photo shows two named students wearing protest sandwich boards, followed by two named men carrying NSPWR protest signs. The caption on the picture begins, “A MIXTURE of viewpoints is represented along this picket line at Paramount theater, as pickets from the National Society for the Preservation of the White Race picket pickets from Macalester College.” The article also reports that the students were picketing as part of a United States National Student Association (NSA) call for boycotts of theaters that owned segregated theaters in the South. A Macalester chaplain is quoted, saying the students organized the picketing after having heard speeches by Wyatt T. Walker, assistant to Rev. Martin Luther King; and by Timothy Jenkins, vice president of the NSA. The students said they were not affiliated with an organized group.
The article attempts to be an unbiased report of a protest and counter-protest event. The report gives the same amount of column space to the 65 Macalester College students, as it does to the counter-protestors, who totaled six. The photograph selected, and caption that accompanies it, work to represent “a mixture of viewpoints,” though it would seem finding a shot with two of the four counter-demonstrators in it would have been a challenge.
It is interesting to note that on the same front page as the “Integration Issue” story, there is a “Once Over Lightly” item in the upper left corner. The item starts with the line, “Tell me Mr. Bones…, and continues with “For as long as there have been minstrel shows…” This start is followed by some context for an anti-tax “parody of Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg address,” and then the parody itself. Would most readers of that time have recognized any unself-conscious racism present in their paper’s breezy attempt at humor?
We’re left to wonder about what earlier events led a group of Macalester students to this moment of demonstration. What beyond the speeches they heard the week before influenced the thinking of Macalester students in 1961? What role did the nationwide wave of boycotts, sit-ins, voter registrations, and actions in the late 1950s and early 1960s play? Were the students motivated by contemporary stories of lynching and murder of African Americans? New activist groups that worked for change in African American lives had been recently formed at the time: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and perhaps most particularly related to this story, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Did these Macalester students know the background of the movement they were acting in? Picketing Jim Crow theaters was a way for them to participate in protesting injustice locally. Was the demonstration effective in influencing others to boycott the theaters? Did it have any other indirect effect? Did those involved in picketing in February continue to work for civil rights?
Most poignant, with changes to a few details, isn’t this story as fresh today as it was in 1961?
–Herta Pitman
Gene Malott, “INTEGRATION ISSUE, 3 Groups Picket Loop Theaters.” Saint Paul Pioneer Press, (February 13, 1961): 1, theatre picketing, Student Action for Human Rights—SAHR folder, Program Collection.
MetadataTitle: Post About
Creator: Pitman, Herta
Description: This text is part of a collection of student work from the Fall 2017 class HIST 294-04/AMST 294-01, Public History: African American Life — Past, Present and Future. Students selected, described, and analyzed items from the Macalester Archives pertaining to Black history. The entire class collection can be found in the Fall 2017 Public History Class tag.
Date Created:
Dates of Content: February 13, 1961
Type of Content: Text
Source: Gene Malott, “INTEGRATION ISSUE, 3 Groups Picket Loop Theaters.” Saint Paul Pioneer Press, (February 13, 1961): 1, theatre picketing, Student Action for Human Rights—SAHR folder, Program Collection.
URL: https://dwlibrary.macalester.edu/counterbalance/activism/macalester-students-picket-jim-crow-policies-1961/
Suggested Citation: Pitman, Herta. "Post About ." Counterbalance, Macalester College Archives. . Text. https://dwlibrary.macalester.edu/counterbalance/activism/macalester-students-picket-jim-crow-policies-1961/.