Photograph of Lunch Counter Sit-In

Rolls Down Like Wate: American Civil Rights Movement Exhibit at The National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

Lunch Counter Sit-In

This exhibit explores life in the 1950s in the Urban South through interactive displays featuring Jim Crow laws and the people in power who vocally and violently enforced segregation. Despite this adversity, African-American Institutions thrived in Atlanta with a dynamic community network of churches, colleges, schools, fraternal orders, social clubs, and a range of commercial ventures.

State and local “Jim Crow” laws mandated a separate but equal existence for non-whites, defining where they could live and work and go to school, how they could eat and drink, use public transportation—and vote. African Americans who broke the rules sometimes faced arrest, but all too often encountered violent retaliation.

Visitors have the unique opportunity to sit at a model lunch counter and participate in an interactive, simulated sit-in experience.

About the Curator:
George Costello Wolfe (born September 23, 1954) is an American playwright and director of theater and film. He won a Tony Award in 1993 for directing Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and another Tony Award in 1996 for his direction of the musical Bring in 'da Noise/Bring in 'da Funk.