Reverend Douglas E. Moore would later say, in a 1957 interview, that he and his companions had gone to the Royal Ice Cream Parlor on Roxboro Street that Sunday "for ice cream, nothing else." That was almost certainly not true, and Moore probably knew the press would not believe him, and he probably did not care. On June 23, 1957, Moore - the minister of Durham's Asbury Temple Methodist Church - walked into the Royal Ice Cream Parlor at the corner of Roxboro and Dowd Streets with six other African Americans, sat down in the booths reserved for white customers, and refused to leave. The manager called the police. Lieutenant Wallace Upchurch and several officers arrested all seven. The next morning at Durham Recorder's Court, every one of them was convicted of trespassing and fined ten dollars plus court costs. It was, by virtually every measure that matters, the first sit-in of the modern civil rights movement in North Carolina. It happened two and a half years before the Greensboro Four sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter. Hardly anyone remembers it.
Douglas Moore had been planning something like this for years. In an October 1956 letter to Martin Luther King Jr., Moore had proposed that "a regional group which uses the power of nonviolence would help give us direction on national movements." He understood, as King would, the central organizational role of the Black church - sociologist Aldon Morris later wrote that the church "was functioning as the institutional vanguard of a mass based black movement," and Moore was building his movement out of Asbury Temple. The other six who walked into the Royal that day - the Royal Seven - included young members of his congregation and community. Their names are not as famous as they should be. They sat in the whites-only booths. They ordered. They refused to move. They went to jail. The trial took less than a day. The fine was ten dollars apiece. The Durham Morning Herald put the story on the front page; the Raleigh News and Observer buried it inside. The Carolina Times, the local Black newspaper, didn't print anything about it for a month.
Durham in 1957 had a reputation, in the words of Durham-born civil rights leader Pauli Murray, as "a unique town that is more liberal than what you would expect in a Southern state." Black businesses had built North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance and Mechanics & Farmers Bank on Parrish Street - the corridor known as Black Wall Street - and the prosperous Hayti district had its own theaters, restaurants, hospital. North Carolina Central University, founded by Dr. James E. Shepard in 1910, anchored Black higher education. But Durham was still segregated. Jim Crow was rooted. The railroad tracks divided Black neighborhoods from white ones, and standards of living between them were not comparable. Moore's sit-in was both deliberate and risky - and the older Black leadership of Durham was furious about it. The Durham Committee on Negro Affairs, formed in 1935, considered the protest premature. The local NAACP was in the middle of a school-segregation lawsuit and worried that a losing trespassing case might set bad precedent. Other ministers called Moore "radical." The week before the sit-in, Carolina Times editor Louis E. Austin had written a scathing editorial about the DCNA being "too high-brow, too soft and too compromising" - calling for "new blood, new faces and new ideas." Moore was, depending on which Durham elder you asked, either an answered prayer or a dangerous young man.
What the Royal Seven did not get was acquittal. What they did get was a small revolution inside Durham's Black political life. Within months, high school NAACP members - more than half of them girls - were picketing the Royal Ice Cream Parlor under the direction of Floyd McKissick, a Black attorney who would later lead the national Congress of Racial Equality. The Durham Committee on Negro Affairs' Economic Committee, chaired by McKissick and Nathaniel White Sr., debated whether to back a community-wide boycott. They didn't formally endorse Moore. But the protest had shifted the ground. Mass demonstrations spread. The struggle to integrate the Royal Ice Cream Parlor took six years. Finally, in 1963, the owner Coletta sold the business and the new operators integrated it. Six years to desegregate one ice cream shop. The sit-in had unsealed something. In 1960, after Greensboro and a wave of sit-ins across the South, Moore captured the moment with one of the great quotes of the movement: "If Woolworth and other stores think that this is just another panty raid, they haven't had their sociologists in the field recently."
Within a week of the February 1960 Greensboro sit-in, students from North Carolina Central and Duke staged a sit-in of their own in Durham. Martin Luther King Jr. came to White Rock Baptist Church and coined the rallying cry "Fill up the jails" - the first time King had publicly endorsed civil disobedience that risked mass arrest. Moore was right there with him. And yet, when historians began telling the story of the sit-in movement, it was Greensboro that became canonical. The Royal Ice Cream Parlor sit-in slipped into footnotes. In 1979, a debate broke out over whether a historical marker for the first sit-in belonged in Durham or Greensboro; even Blackwell M. "Dog" Brogden, one of the prosecutors who had convicted the Royal Seven in 1957, told the press the marker belonged in Durham. Four attempts to place a marker failed. Not until 2007 - fifty years after the protest - did the NC Highway Historical Marker Committee reverse itself and approve a sign. The marker now stands at the site, reading: "ROYAL ICE CREAM SIT-IN: Segregation protest at an ice cream parlor on this site, June 23, 1957, led to court case testing dual racial facilities." Seven names belong on that sign. Most people who pass it still couldn't tell you any of them.
Coordinates 36.0008°N, 78.8932°W at the corner of Roxboro and Dowd Streets in Durham, North Carolina, just north of downtown. Recommended viewing altitude 1,500-2,500 ft AGL. The original Royal Ice Cream Parlor building no longer stands; a small commercial structure and historical marker now occupy the site, located between downtown Durham and the Museum of Life and Science. Nearest airport is Raleigh-Durham International (KRDU), 13 nm southeast.