Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on this day in 1960 alongside dozens of students and local activists after refusing to leave his seat at a segregated department store lunch counter in Atlanta. The protest was part of a sit-in movement that had spread across the South since four students staged the first one at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, earlier that year.
Most of the group had their charges dismissed, but King alone was held over a probation violation tied to an earlier case and sentenced to months of hard labour. The arrest drew national attention when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy personally intervened to help secure his release, a move credited with swinging crucial Black support behind Kennedy weeks before he won the presidency.
