Weingarten's Sit-in

On March 4, 1960, a group of Texas Southern University students walked into the Weingarten's grocery store at 4110 Almeda Road, sat down at its whites-only lunch counter and waited to be served. It was Houston's first sit-in, staged barely a month after four students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began the wave of lunch-counter protests across the South. The students were led by Eldrewey Stearns, then a TSU law student, and called themselves the Progressive Youth Association. They gathered at the flagpole beside Hannah Hall on the TSU campus, prayed, and marched in pairs down Wheeler Street to the store, picking up onlookers along the way. Stearns had telephoned the police beforehand in the hope of keeping the protest peaceful. At the counter the students were insulted by customers and staff and were never served. The Texas Historical Commission's marker puts their number at thirteen. The students carried the protest on to other segregated businesses, while Black and white civic leaders met privately to negotiate, and within months many of Houston's public establishments had quietly desegregated.

The Weingarten's store is gone, and a United States Post Office occupies the site. A Texas Historical Marker honoring the students was dedicated in front of it on March 4, 2010, the fiftieth anniversary, after TSU journalism professor Serbino Sandifer-Walker spent two years working to have it placed.