Qualla: Royal Ice Cream sit-in

Royal Ice Cream sit-in: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Royal Ice Cream sit-in: The Royal Seven

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Royal Ice Cream sit-in: Hayti and the Long Argument

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 P...

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Royal Ice Cream sit-in: The Six-Year Boycott

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 McKissic...

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Royal Ice Cream sit-in: A Marker, Fifty Years Late

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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