At Woolworth's variety store in Jackson on May 28, 1963, a pivotal event in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement unfolded when three black Tougaloo College students, Pearlena Lewis, Annie Moody, and Memphis Norman, sat at the whites-only lunch counter seeking service as part of nonviolent protests planned by Medgar Evers and John Salter. As demonstrations began after black leaders had walked out of a meeting with Mayor Allen Thompson, police and press arrived at the store but officers remained outside, while a growing mob of students, businessmen, local toughs, and others shouted racial epithets and attacked the protesters. Norman was knocked from his stool and kicked, Lewis and Moody were pulled away but regained their seats, and Joan Trumpauer and Lois Chaffee joined them as integrated supporters. The crowd doused the demonstrators with mustard, salt, pepper, sugar, ketchup, and spray paint, while Salter, Mercedes Wright, Walter Williams, Ed King, A.D. Beittel, George Raymond, and Tom Beard were drawn into the violence or the effort to respond to it. The three-hour siege ended at 2 p.m. when Woolworth's regional manager closed the store, and that evening a firebomb was hurled at Medgar Evers's home; two weeks later Evers was assassinated.
