Lunch counters at downtown dime stores such as Woolworth and McCrory's served only white patrons until, on February 13, 1960, eight Florida A&M University students and two African-American high school students sat at the Woolworth lunch counter and asked to be served in sympathy with the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. When service was denied, they remained seated in silent protest despite two hours of heckling from white patrons, and the store manager closed the counter before police arrived. Over the next two months, members of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, an interracial organization that followed a strategy of moral suasion based on the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, held several more sit-ins, with Patricia and Priscilla Stephens playing especially important roles in coordinating them. Although Florida political leaders denounced the students' actions as illegal and incendiary, the protesters continued exposing racial discrimination while enduring physical and verbal abuse, supported morally, emotionally, and financially by Tallahassee civil rights organizations and African American churches. On March 17, Judge John Rudd found the first group of eleven arrestees guilty of disturbing the peace and sentenced each to pay a $300 fine or spend sixty days in jail, and in an unprecedented move they chose jail over bail. After three years of continued economic pressure, downtown business owners desegregated their lunch counters, and the sit-ins encouraged continued nonviolent direct action against everyday injustice and inequality.