On July 19, 1958, several black teenagers, members of the local NAACP chapter,
entered the downtown Dockum Drug Store and sat down at the lunch counter.
They were ignored.
They kept coming back and sitting at the counter,
from before lunch through the dinner hour,
at least twice a week for the next several weeks.
They sat quietly, creating no disturbance,
but refusing to leave without being served.


The store tried to wait them out by ignoring them.
They kept coming back and sitting there, silently, day after day,
waiting to be served.
On one occasion three police officers tried to coerce and intimidate the teenagers to leave,
and succeeded.
But they came back, and the police did not return.
They were breaking no law, only a store policy,
and the store was not willing to challenge them directly.


A group of local white toughs came by trying to intimidate them.
The police were called to break it up
but left immediately without challenging the whites,
saying they had instructions to keep their hands off.
After an emergency phone call a group of local black men arrived,
armed, to defend the protesters.
The white youths retreated, leaving the store.


And the young people kept coming back and sitting there
at the lunch counter, silently, day after day, waiting to be served.




On August 11, while the early arrivals were sitting at the counter
waiting for their friends to show,
a white man around 40 walked in and looked at them for several minutes.
Then he looked at the store manager, and said, simply,
"Serve them. I'm losing too much money."
He then walked back out.
That man was the owner of the Dockum drug store chain.