Civil Rights Protestors Stage Sit-Down at White House

Mar. 11, 1965 - A group of youthful civil rights demonstrators staged a sitdown in the White House for almost seven hours today demanding Federal intervention in Selma, Ala.

It was the first such demonstration inside the White House, although for three days and nights pickets have been marching on the north sidewalk of the mansion outside the fence.

The sitdown demonstrators said they had been dragged out, gently but firmly, by White House and D.C. policemen after they had spurned pleas by the President’s staff to leave.

Ten girls and two boys were booked on charges of illegal entry and then released on their own recognizance. Two other boys had left the White House voluntarily.

The demonstrators entered the mansion along with hundreds of other tourists taking a tour of the public rooms, conducted between 10 a.m. and noon, except Sundays, Mondays, and holidays. 

The possibility of a new sit-in attempt tomorrow was indicated when the White House announced the tours would be held and the group of demonstrators said some of their friends might imitate their action.

The group first sat down at 11:15 a.m. in the main first-floor corridor near the White House library and began to sing, “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

They said later that a White House policeman remarked, “You are ruining an old tradition.”

They later moved voluntarily to a corridor near the White House theater in the East Wing, just outside of the “mansion” proper.

They said that Bill Moyers, perhaps the most important member of the White House staff, and Lee White, a special counsel to the President, had come to talk to them shortly before they were ejected.

Pamela Haynes, 22, one of those arrested, quoted Moyers as asking, “How would you like it if someone came into your house and refused to move?”

She said they answered him that “the owner of the house hasn’t asked us to move.”

She said that White told them the President “is having 60 couples in tonight” and that they should move. This was a reference to a reception for Congressmen and their wives.

Finally, they said that Maj. Ralph Stover, chief of the White House police force, said, “You have overstayed your welcome.”

They said they mostly had been pulled out with their heels dragging but that one demonstrator had been carried by a policeman. They were hurried off the White House grounds in police cars.

President Johnson never saw them. One source said, however, that he ordered or approved their forcible expulsion.

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