As a freshman Spelmanite in 1960, Georgianne Thomas, then 18, was so committed to the Atlanta Student Movement that not even the burn of a klansman’s cigarette being pressed into her skin could make her lose her cool or deter her from protesting segregation.
“We’re not supposed to stop the line. So you let the burn go on. You let the people spit on you. You let the people call you all the names. You let everybody laugh and then you keep walking because you’ve gotta keep the line going,” Thomas told Capital B Atlanta from her home in Atlanta.
Though she isn’t a household name, the freedom fighter turned author and professor was a “foot soldier” in the Atlanta Student Movement who chose to take a stand for equal rights. Like every participant in the Civil Rights Movement, she played a crucial role in forcing America to reckon with the hypocrisy inherent in its strictly enforced racial hierarchy.
Thomas’ parents met while students at Spelman and Morehouse but chose to marry and raise her and her sister in Gary, Indiana. Throughout her childhood, Thomas said her parents sheltered them from the reality of segregation, and she arrived on Spelman’s idyllic campus wholly unprepared for life in the Jim Crow South.
“I didn’t have any notion that there was something different about me until I got off the train in Atlanta, Georgia,” the 82-year-old said. “I got an education immediately.”
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Thomas was introduced to the burgeoning student movement at the beginning of her first semester during an assembly held at Sisters Chapel. She recalled immediately wanting to join when Roslyn Pope, then-president of Spelman’s student government association, told them about the new movement she, Julian Bond, Charles Black, and Lonnie King — also students — had started the previous semester.
“I was young, I was committed, and I had made up my mind that I was going to [march],” Thomas said.
Before she could participate, Thomas and the other foot soldiers had to be trained not to react to white counterprotesters who often tried to provoke the students into a violent confrontation by screaming, hitting, and spitting on them.
“That takes a special feeling about yourself that you don’t [react], that you don’t stop the line. That you are committed to whatever is going to happen to you.”
Georgianne Thomas
“That takes a special feeling about yourself that you don’t [react], that you don’t stop the line. That you are committed to whatever is going to happen to you,” Thomas continued.
Foot soldiers were often on the frontlines at marches and sit-ins risking their own safety. But they were supported by dozens of other students who participated behind the scenes to keep the movement running.
“There was a contingent of students who didn’t want to march or were afraid to march or didn’t want to be involved, and their job was to take notes so when we came off the line we could just go to them and find out what happened in class,” Thomas remembered.
Students and faculty from across the Atlanta University Center formed a network of support for the growing movement; Pope and Bond wrote the movement’s famous manifesto that was published in the New York Times, “An Appeal for Human Rights,” on a typewriter borrowed from Spelman professor Howard Zinn.
The college’s administrators, however, were slow to support the movement and early on encouraged students to leave the civil rights struggle to organizations like the NAACP. The schools sent letters to the foot soldiers’ parents notifying them that their child was protesting and that the school could not protect them from arrest.
“They would tell us that we needed to be concerned about our welfare, but we were more concerned about our people rather than our welfare,” Thomas said.
Her nonviolence training was quickly put to the test at her second march in October 1960, when a klansmen pressed his cigarette to her arm outside Rich’s department store. The organizers chose Rich’s because it was the largest department store chain in the South; they believed that if Rich’s integrated, other businesses would follow suit.
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Black shoppers were not permitted to try on clothes, use the white-only restrooms, or sit at a table in the Magnolia Room, a popular restaurant in Rich’s flagship store in downtown Atlanta.
While Thomas and other foot soldiers marched outside the store, she remembers that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of over 50 other students inside to integrate the Magnolia Room. They were later arrested for refusing to leave their seats.
Thomas was not arrested that day and charges against many of her fellow foot soldiers were later dropped, but their high-profile leader was less fortunate.
Thirty-one-year-old King was quickly transferred to DeKalb County — a KKK stronghold at the time — where a judge immediately sentenced him to four months hard labor for an outstanding traffic violation.
The young preacher was released after a week in jail thanks to an intervention by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. A few days later, 68% of Black Americans (who were largely Republican at the time) voted for him in the 1960 general election, which Kennedy narrowly won.
Thomas graduated from Spelman College in 1964 and went on to earn a master’s degree from Georgia State University and a doctorate from Clark Atlanta University. She had a decades-long corporate career at Delta Airlines before transitioning to academia 20 years ago, first teaching at Clark Atlanta and now at Atlanta Metropolitan State College.
To preserve the legacy of the work done by the Atlanta Student Movement, in 2012, Thomas and her daughter Alvelyn Sanders produced an independent documentary called Foot Soldiers: Class of 1964. The doc was given to PBS to ensure the efforts of those fearless young people could be seen more widely.
“What we want is for people to see it and know the history and know the story,” Thomas said.
