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Historical Highway MarkersRichmond 34SA-83
On 22 Feb. 1960, 34 Virginia Union University students, 11 women and 23 men, refused to leave the segregated dining facilities here at Thalhimers department store and were arrested. Charged with trespassing, they were later convicted and fined. This sit-in was part of a wave of protests across the South inspired by recent sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. The arrests of the Richmond 34 sparked the Campaign for Human Dignity, which organized boycotts and picketed Richmond businesses. Thalhimers and other retailers subsequently desegregated. In June 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions of the Richmond 34 in Randolph v. Virginia.
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References/Bibliographic Citation: Peter Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth Century Virginia (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2004), 118-137. “Intersection of Change” Style Weekly (2008), V. 26, pp14-16, 18-19. “Sit in Convictions Reversed; Cases Sent Back to Virginia,” Richmond Afro American, 22 June 1963, 9. “State Sit-in Convictions are Reversed,” Richmond times Dispatch, June 1963, 1,4. |