San Francisco-Lucky Stores-1964-Civil Rights Protests

[Jason B.]

In 1963-64, civil rights activists targeted many San Francisco businesses to advocate increased hiring members of racial minority groups, especially Blacks/African-Americans. A Cadillac dealership was taken over. The Sheraton-Palace Hotel, Bank of America branches and Mel's Drive-In restaurants also were sites of protest. Lucky supermarkets within San Francisco also were targeted for "shop-in" protests. Protesters from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) loaded shopping carts, took them to checkstands and then refused to pay for the items after a clerk bagged them.

See: http://online.sfsu.edu/~mlumish/SocialJ ... Lucky.html

Store employees then de-bagged the groceries and protesters gathered another batch of items to repeat the process. Photographs depict Lady Lee-label and other Lucky merchandise piled on a supermarket floor, presumably awaiting their return to shelves. A Lucky store on Sloat Boulevard (Lakeshore Plaza) apparently was the site of a nine-day protest in February 1964. Protests apparently also took place at Lucky store(s) in Berkeley.

[Groceteria]

Great site. My only complaint is that the photo captioned "Mel's on Geary Blvd." is quite clearly the South Van Ness location. (Sorry. I do historical photo metadata for a living now, which may explain why I'm too exhausted to do much of it on the site anymore).