On Feb. 29, 1960, answering a call to action from Tampa civil rights leader Rev. A. Leon Lowry, dozens of students from the city’s two Black high schools, Middleton and Blake, staged the first of several sit-ins to desegregate the lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworth store on Franklin Street downtown.
Arthenia Joyner, former Florida state senator, was one of the demonstrators who walked from St. Paul A.M.E. Church to Woolworth’s.
“As we got closer there were some people on the sidewalk watching us that didn’t look too happy, but we had been told to just walk on in, don’t make eye contact, just go in,’ Joyner recalls.
Joyner and others, including Shirley Lowry, widow of Rev. Lowry; former U.S. Representative Jim Davis; and former Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, have launched a campaign to raise $200,000 to stage a play about the sit-ins, called “When the Righteous Triumph,’’ by Tampa playwright Mark E. Leib. They want it to run for several days next March at the Jaeb Theater in the Straz Center for the Performing Arts.
“Bring the story back to life”
“When the Righteous Triumph” had a run in March of 2023 at Stageworks Theatre in Tampa. The actors portray Lowry; Clarence Fort, president of the Tampa NAACP Youth Council, who organized the sit-ins; student demonstrators; the white lunch counter manager and waitress who refused to serve the protesters; and two white men who worked in support of the protestors, Mayor Julian Lane and prominent lawyer Cody Fowler, who was Davis’ grandfather.
![]()
Stageworks Theatre"When the Righteous Triumph" tells the story of Tampa's civil rights lunch counter sit-ins.“It took my breath away,” Davis says. “The gentleman who played my grandfather reminded me a lot of my grandfather. I was very close to my grandfather. I was really struck. I knew the story but to see it in person and frankly bring my grandfather back to life, bring the story back to life, was unbelievable for me.’’
He says a lot of people heard about the play after it had run and wished they had seen it.
“I was struck by how timely the message was and how well received it was across the spectrum,” he says.
Davis says they aren’t sure how many performances will be staged.
“Our goal is to give more people, particularly students, an opportunity to see this we think timely, unifying story,” he says.
A part of Tampa’s history
“It’s a part of Tampa history,’’ says Shirley Lowry. “It’s a true story. And think about what‘s happening right now in Florida and even across the country; children do not know this story. And I think for us to build a stronger future and for us to be, let’s say not divided, they need to hear stories from the past and relate that to the future. This is the time to show them because right now I think there are examples of what happened in the past that they can refer to.’’
She says she, too, was impressed by the play and met the actor who played her late husband.
“I gave him a tape so he could study the reverend's voice. I gave him suspenders and a tie so he could feel the reverend's spirit,” she says. “I was gripped by the part when he’s saying the speech. I was really touched by it.’’
Shirley Lowry, Rev. Lowry’s second wife – his first wife died years before – was much younger than her husband. She says she frequently asked him to talk about his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement.
“Typically, I would say, ‘Honey, tell me some stories because I need to know,’” she says. “He had been one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachers when King was studying theology at Morehouse College in Atlanta. In addition to lunch counters, he led the struggle to integrate buses, railroads, schools and other places that had excluded them. “He was great long before he came to Tampa. He was already a very great man.’’
Shirley Lowry says her husband was humble when asked about the lunch counter sit-ins.
“It wasn’t a big deal to him,” she says. “He was a Morehouse man so he was taught that you come into this world to make a difference. You come into this world to make it a better place than when you came into it. And that was reverend’s philosophy.”
“I had to do this”
Lowry had asked 20 students from each of the two Black high schools, Blake and Middleton, to take part in the sit-in. Joyner was a 17-year-old Middleton student at the time.
“We were told, this is what you’re going to do,” she recalls. “I called my mom. I told her whatever happens, happens. But I had to do this because I knew as a young black student that we were not treated right.”
![]()
Tampa Bay History Center"When the Righteous Triumph" depicts the February 29, 1960 sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter downtown, which launched the Civil Rights Movement in Tampa in earnest.
Black customers could spend hundreds of dollars on merchandise in the variety store but could not sit at the counter and be served, she notes.
“I didn’t have any apprehension about going,” Joyner says.
When the students entered the store and sat at the lunch counter, the attendants put up a sign stating that the counter was closed.
“And nobody asked you what you wanted or anything,” Joyner says. “It was just closed down. Nobody that I can recall even responded to our request.’’
The demonstrators did not meet with violence, as happened later at sit-ins in other Southern cities. Fort told a Tampa Bay Times reporter in a 2018 interview that the worst thing that happened was that a white Woolworth’s customer spit on his shoulder.
He credited Mayor Lane, who “refused to be bullied’’ into trying to stop the sit-ins.
Lane had formed a bi-racial committee of white business leaders and Black community leaders and worked to have an orderly integration of businesses in Tampa. Police blocked traffic while the demonstrators marched. Cody Fowler appealed to merchants around town to integrate.
Lunch counters at Woolworth’s, Kress and other businesses were integrated by September of that year. Davis, talking about his grandfather, says, “I just think he believed, as we all do, we’re all God’s children. And I think that particular time, whether you were black or white or brown didn’t matter. He stood up for his belief just as Mayor Lane did and Reverend Lowry.’’
Joyner notes that “better angels prevailed.”
“It was a time in the country when it could have been chaos but we had a leader, and he had the cooperation of the business community and Black leaders,” she says.
Desegregation
Steven Lawson, a retired history professor who taught at the University of South Florida for 20 years and researched the era, talked to some of the leaders involved. He says that after the sit-ins, the organizers would send two Black people to various lunch counters and restaurants in town to see if they were still resisting integration.
Fort told him in an interview that in September 1960, he went in by himself to the counter at Walgreens when his lunch partner didn’t show up. He ordered breakfast and was served, but two white men stood behind him and taunted him. He asked for the check and was about to leave when the manager stopped him and asked him to stay and walk around the store for a while because he had called the police. Lawson says he doesn’t know whether police arrested the two white men, but the harassment stopped.
Resentment apparently didn’t, however. Lane, who had defeated Nick Nuccio in 1959, ran for re-election in 1963 but lost to Nuccio.
“He told me that he thought he lost because of what he had done in trying to desegregate,’’ Lawson recalls. “He said he even lost Seminole Heights, which is where he came from.’’
To contribute to the effort to restage the play, go to “When the Righteous Triumph" donations or email Jim Davis at [email protected].