Counter Histories: Documenting the Struggle to Desegregate Southern Restaurants

Counter Histories: Documenting the Struggle to Desegregate Southern Restaurants is a stunning website on the lunch counter sit-ins, bringing the history to life with with historic film clips, interviews with movement veterans and historians, and timelines.

Counter Histories encourages viewers to think beyond the demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s. Visitors see and hear protesters talk about how their actions set the stage for a relatively integrated Southern present. Historians ground these events in the broader Civil Rights Movement. Activists talk, fifty years later, talk about how they leveraged moral authority to practice nonviolence and achieve desegregation.