Baton Rouge Sit-Ins

Sixteen students, arrested in two days. On March 28, 1960, seven Southern University students sat at the Kress lunch counter and were taken out within about twenty minutes. The next day seven more were arrested at Sitman's and two at the Greyhound station. They were Eddie Brown Jr., John Garner, Janette Hosten Harris, Colonel Lawrence Hurst, John and Kenneth Johnson, Mark and Sandra Jones, Vernon Jordan, Mary Briscoe, Jo Ann Morris, Donald Moss, Larry Nicholas, Charles Peabody, Marvin Robinson and Felton Valdry. Their president suspended all sixteen. In 2004 the legislature gave them honorary degrees.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Capitol Park Museum — 0.2 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Old State Capitol — 0.3 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.4 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.1 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Fort Sumter Saloon — steps away
• Congregation B'Nai Israel — steps away
• Zachary Taylor Home Site — steps away
• Zachary Taylor — 0.3 mi