Little-known piece of Tampa's Black history takes center stage at the Straz Center

Name: USF students that staged sit-ins honored on stage
Uploaded: 2025-02-18T14:41:15-05:00
Description: Briona Arradondo reports.

USF students that staged sit-ins honored on stage

Briona Arradondo reports.

TAMPA, Fla. - In 1960, a group of Black students protested racial injustice with a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter in Tampa, and that piece of Tampa’s history is about to take center stage at the Straz Center.

"What this represents was the first time activists were taking it back to the street in the sense that it’s out of the courtroom," said Andrew Huse, the curator of Florida Studies in Special Collections at the University of South Florida Libraries.

READ: Tampa's Path to Equality Part 1: The First Steps

The backstory:

On February 29, 1960, a group of Black students sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Tampa to protest its whites-only service policy. It led to the desegregation of lunch counters in the downtown area. Then, years later, people like Huse made sure to preserve that local history.

"We all did oral histories with people who were directly involved with the sit-ins. People like Clarence Fort, he was one of the main leaders of the youth council here," said Huse. "And then other people before us did interviews with people like Leon Lowry, Francisco Rodriguez, all of these people who were really important; Robert Saunders."

Huse said USF played a big role in saving those stories, adding context to documents and photos they collected from the community.

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"In the sixties, early seventies, there weren’t a lot of repositories around. And if you think about Tampa in 1970, we didn’t have a lot of museums. We didn’t have those types of places," said Huse.

And in the present day, the Tampa sit-in may not be widely known.

What they're saying:

"As a professor, I find a lot of my students don’t know much about U.S. history, not to mention Florida history," said Mark Leib, an assistant professor of instruction at USF.

Big picture view:

Leib wrote a play that premiered two years ago called "When the Righteous Triumph" about the Tampa sit-ins, bringing the city’s Black history in desegregating the downtown lunch counters to the stage.

MORE: Tampa's Path to Equality Part 2: The Awakening

"It’s a play about an idea in a way, and the idea is ‘may I have a cup of coffee?’" said Leib. "So racism was alive and well in 1960, and here we are in 2025, and I wish I could say that it’s gone away. But it hasn’t, and people need to know about it."

This year, Leib's play is getting a second run produced by Stageworks Theatre, this time with a bigger audience at the Straz Center from March 6 to March 9.

"It already has about 2,000 high school and middle school students scheduled to come to special matinées at 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. A lot of teachers around here want students to know the background of the civil rights movement in Tampa," said Leib.

What you can do:

It’s a story of progress and results that have been archived and now ready for the public to learn from once again. If you would like to see the production while it’s at the Straz, you can get tickets here.

The Source: The information in this story was gathered through interviews with Andrew Huse and Mark Leib.

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