il rights movement was slow in organizing and was riven with internal dissension. The leadership of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations in the North, such as the Urban League and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters headed by A. William Randolph, were inclined to proceed cautiously and were uncomfortable with the new insurgent black leadership in the South which after the Montgomery boycott was increasingly dominated by Martin Luther King, Jr., the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King, a devotee of the principles of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance first developed by Henry Thoreau and practiced by Mahatma Gandhi during the Indian independence movement, was not moving fast enough in the face of determined white opposition in the South to satisfy many of his younger followers.
In April, 1960, four young black college freshmen initiated a spontaneous sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina which rapidly spread to othe
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