Don’t You Sit Down is an installation by faculty of the Department of Interior Architecture and graduate students of the department’s program in Exhibition and Narrative Environments. The three-part exhibition begins in the front façade of the RISD Museum and extends across the street to Market Square with an augmented reality phone app (coming soon). Click on the silhouettes/seats (right) to hear about segregation past and present.

On February 1st, 1960, Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Joseph McNeil, four Black freshmen from North Carolina A & T State University in Greensboro, NC, frustrated that African Americans were not allowed to sit at the counter of the Woolworth store, politely sat down on the stools of the lunch counter and asked to be served. This nonviolent act of protest for civil rights came to be known as the Greensboro Sit-In.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the The Civil Rights Act that prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

In October 2013, more than half a century after the Sit-In and at a Starbucks in New Haven, CT, Jeffrey Fletcher, an African American police officer in uniform, was denied the bathroom key after it had just been given to a white customer before him.

As a collector of African American artefacts and the owner of four Greensboro Sit-In stools, Jeffrey met members of the faculty from RISD’s Department of Interior Architecture in February 2020. As a department with a graduate degree in Exhibition and Narrative Environments, we heard his story of Jim Crow and felt compelled to use our discipline to share it with the RISD community and the world. This is his story and the story of everyone who has experienced segregation, past, present and future.

Exhibition Team Yaminay Chaudhri, Michael Grugl, Chufan He, Wolfgang Rudorf, Yuyi Si, Ni Tang, Liliane Wong, Jiarui Wu.

Acknowledgments This exhibit came about from idea to reality through the support of RISD Provost Kent Kleinman, RISD Associate Provost for Social Equity & Inclusion Matthew Shenoda, RISD A&D Dean Scheri Fultineer, Associate Provost for Research Sarah Cunningham, the RISD Museum, the Donghia Foundation, the City of Providence Parks Department. Many thanks for the generosity of time and effort from many colleagues across the RISD campus: Linda Muller, Wendy Abelson, Stephen Wing, Derek Schusterbauer, Michael Owen, Dylan Costa, Andrew Grant, Jen Howeley, Steve McDonald, Monica DaSilva, Joseph Realejo, Christine Chang, Ernesto Aparicio, Elizabeth Debs, Simone Tubman, Christopher Roberts, Alex Hornstein, Brian Clark, Patricia Roka, and Matthew Azevedo. Thank you to George Hovagimiam from MB Graphics for his invaluable assistance. We are most grateful to Jibreel Khazan for talking to the team and for teaching us about courage and doing what we believe in. We thank Jeffrey Fletcher for his generous loan of the Greensboro Sit-In stools but, most of all, for inspiring this exhibition.

National Organization of Minority Architects - NOMA 50 Conference Presentation
October 21, 2021

Exhibition Documentation:

Photo Credits: Jo Sittenfeld

Don’t You Sit Down!

— Joseph McNeil

Don’t You
Sit Down!