On the morning of March 4, 1960, a group of 13 Texas Southern University students walked from campus to a Weingarten’s grocery store on Almeda Road.
They took seats at the lunch counter and ordered food from a business that refused to serve Black customers. The students were denied service, but they did not leave, remaining seated in quiet protest and igniting Houston’s first major civil rights demonstration.
At the time, segregation laws and customs across the South barred Black customers from sitting at “white-only” lunch counters.
Sixty-six years later, the lunch counter is gone. The city has transformed. The laws have changed…