The Berkeley student movement of the 1960s began with the picketing of Woolworth’s stores in support of the Southern struggle against white racism in public accommodations. On February 1, 1960, four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina sat down at a “whites-only” Woolworth’s lunch counter and asked to be served coffee. In the following weeks, similar actions spread throughout the South, as ten to twenty thousand black students (and some whites) held sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, mainly at Woolworth’s, then one of the largest chain stores in the country.

In the North, picketing of Woolworth’s publicized its racist actions and put economic pressure on the chain to end its Southern Jim Crow practices. The picketing was part of a strategy to leverage Northern support against segregated Southern public accommodations. The sit-ins and picketing followed in the footsteps of the direct action approach the Montgomery bus boycott had taken a few years earlier. Sit-ins were the first act of what was to become the 1960s radical upsurge.

Witnessing the courage and militancy of the Southern students — seeing the bravery of ordinary people — challenged the thinking and behavior of activists. It emboldened the University of California, Berkeley students to carry out their own local direct action. They landed a knockout blow in May 1960 against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the headhunters of the McCarthyite crusade to terrorize the nation into Cold War conformity.