Today, Louisville’s businesses are prohibited from discriminating against customers based on race, color or national origin. Our community owes those protections in large part to a teenage boy and his high school friends who led a massive sit-in movement downtown in 1961.
Raoul Cunningham was just 14 years old when he took part in his first protest against segregation: picketing a whites-only showing of Porgy and Bess on Christmas Day in 1959.
He would go on to organize a series of sit-ins at businesses in downtown Louisville. He got arrested by police, assaulted by segregationists and threatened with academic failure by his high school principal. But he did not stop.
In the decades that followed, Cunningham became a staple in the fight for civil rights and has left an indelible mark on Louisville.
Louisville Public Media is celebrating our 75th anniversary this year. To honor that, we are sharing the stories of 75 people who have changed our community for the better. Listen to our profile of Cunningham in the audio player above.
LPM has featured Cunningham in countless reports through the years. He became the president of the Louisville Branch of the NAACP in 2004 and held the seat until his retirement last year. He’s known for managing the 1967 campaign of Georgia Davis Powers, Kentucky’s first Black state senator, and for years of work to make Martin Luther King Junior Day a national and state holiday.
Cunningham was also pivotal in ending segregation in Louisville.
When Cunningham entered high school in the late 1950s, schools in Louisville weren’t racially segregated anymore, but pretty much everything else still was. Black businesses were located downtown on Walnut Street, now renamed Muhammad Ali Boulevard, and most other downtown establishments were white-only.
Most white-owned clothing stores prohibited Black customers from trying on clothing. Cunningham remembers how salespeople would trace Black customers’ feet on butcher paper to measure their foot size, rather than allowing them to try on a shoe.
“But if you had high arches you were in trouble,” Cunningham said. “You couldn’t even try on gloves.”
Most white-owned restaurants would sell food to Black customers, but only to-go. Black customers weren’t allowed to dine in. Cunningham remembers wanting to stop downtown for a hotdog or hamburger. But his family had a rule.
“My mother and my grandmother would say ‘If we can’t sit and eat, we won't buy,’” Cunningham said.
It was his family’s way of resisting. Cunningham’s mother was a member of the local NAACP. In 1959, at age 14, Cunningham and the NAACP Youth Council did something very clever. They knew the Brown Theatre — a movie house at the time with a strict whites-only policy — would not let the teens in to watch a premiere of Porgy and Bess. So, they bought tickets through mail order and used the address of the First Unitarian Church, which supported their cause.
On Christmas Day, 1959, Cunningham and his companions gathered at the church, grabbed their tickets and walked several blocks to the Brown Theatre.
“Now we had already made picket signs, but we didn’t carry them at first. When we were denied we then went back to the church, got our picket signs, went back and began picketing,” Cunningham said.
People stared. White movie-goers went around them, mostly indifferent to the picketers and their signs.
“I did learn one valuable lesson that day,” Cunningham said. “I had on some new shoes and my mom said ‘Are you sure you want to wear new shoes?”
Soon, his feet started hurting.
“So I called her and said please bring my old pair of shoes,” Cunningham laughed.
By 1960, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. Black college students were holding sit-ins at segregated lunch counters across the country. Most famously in Greensboro, North Carolina, but also in Tennessee, Virginia and Houston, Texas.
In Louisville, a 12-member Board of Aldermen ran the city. The board’s sole Black member, William Beckett, brought forward a new proposal: the public accommodations ordinance. It would prevent local businesses from discriminating against people based on race. The other aldermen refused to support it. So, the local NAACP started organizing people to vote them out.
They had help from Martin Luther King Jr.
Cunningham went to the Louisville Armory, now Louisville Gardens, with more than 9,000 other people in 1960 to see King speak.
“That was the first time I saw him in person,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham was excited by the sit-ins across the country. But they were mostly led by college students at historic Black colleges and universities, and Louisville didn’t have an active local HBCU then. Cunningham decided to organize his friends from Male High School, Shawnee High School and Central High School. They also coordinated with members of the Congress of Racial Equality (COR), another civil rights group.
“At that time, through the YMCA, you knew most of your contemporaries. So I recruited and they joined,” Cunningham said.
The adult branch of the NAACP was anxious about the youth protest.
“While they supported the movement, they were apprehensive of our participation because we were high school students and the fact that they were nervous of how it would affect our lives,” Cunningham said.
On a Thursday in February of 1961, Cunningham and about 18 other students walked into Stewart’s Dry Goods on Fourth Street — the largest department store in Louisville. They went down the escalator to the whites-only lunch counter on the first floor.
“They would not let us in,” Cunningham said. “So we would just stand there. And we would block anyone else from coming in or block them from coming out.”
The security guards threatened to arrest the group. “We don’t serve Negros,” the guards would say, according to Cunningham.
“And we would reply, ‘We don’t eat ‘em either … We want a hamburger,’” Cunningham said.
Stewart’s shut down Thursday and Friday in response to the sit-ins. On the following Monday, when the same students showed up again after school, Stewart’s called the police.
“The house detective pointed me out first, and off they took me,” Cunningham said.
Police arrested five students that day and charged them with disorderly conduct.
The next morning, more consequences awaited Cunningham at Male High School. The principal, Williams Standford Milburn, called the 17-year-old into his office. Milburn, a white man, was the president of the city’s Board of Aldermen, he was running for mayor, and he was against the public accommodations ordinance.
“And he basically said if I continued I would not graduate,” Cunningham said.
But the threats didn’t stop him, or his fellow students.
“The Black students were all congratulatory and happy, and most of them who could joined us,” Cunningham explained.
The next day, around 75 students joined Cunningham for more sit-ins. On the largest days, as many as 200 student protesters could shut down nearly every segregated business downtown. The students led the sit-ins almost daily throughout the spring of 1961.
Everyone who protested took a pledge of nonviolence each day before they walked downtown. It meant that no matter what segregationists did to them, they would not react with violence. It wasn’t easy. Cunningham remembered one white couple who spat on them and stepped on their feet. Employees at one restaurant would throw dirty mop water on them.
A few businesses changed their racist policies in response to the students. Others didn’t.
“Sit-ins were a tactic that drew public attention and the need for the ordinance,” Cunningham said.
The other piece was voter registration, Cunningham said.
Since the Democrats on the Board of Alderman would not support the public accommodations ordinance, the Louisville NAACP organized people to vote them out and back Republicans who vowed they would not oppose the ordinance.
And it worked. Voters defeated Milburn and the entire board of Aldermen. Two years later in 1963, the Republican-led Board of Alderman passed the public accommodations ordinance, ending segregation in businesses.
When those same Republicans refused to support a new ordinance to prevent discrimination in housing, the NAACP organized again and voted them out to bring in new Democrats who supported fair housing laws.
The spring of 1961 sparked a fire in Cunningham that never went out. What he realized then about the power of democracy became a guiding principle for the rest of his life.
Cunningham dedicated himself to a career supporting political candidates and causes he believed in. He graduated high school, despite Milburn’s efforts to flunk him, and went onto Howard University.
Now in his 80s, Cunningham still believes democracy is the answer to solving ongoing civil rights issues, even in a time when democracy itself is becoming less popular.
“For those of us who believe in democracy and equality, we can’t just throw up our hands,” he said. “We’ve got to work and hopefully younger people will take up the mantle and realize that democracy is the best method … and work to preserve it.”
In honor of LPM’s 75th Anniversary, we're sharing the stories of 75 people who are changing our community for the better. We want to hear about someone who makes your life better. Share your story at lpm.org/75andChange.
