Memphis Norman, 62; Budget Examiner Took Part as a Student in Historic 1963 Sit-In at Woolworth’s

Memphis Norman, a participant in a historic 1963 Woolworth’s sit-in in Jackson, Miss., has died. He was 62.

Norman, a retired budget examiner with the Office of Management and Budget in Washington, D.C., died Jan. 4 of a heart attack at his home in Falls Church, Va.

Norman was a student at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, when, at the urging of Medgar Evers and other leaders of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, he joined three fellow students and a white professor at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson.

The sit-in on May 28, 1963, was part of the ongoing “Jackson Movement” to protest the city’s segregated facilities and its treatment of African Americans.

As Jackson radio and TV stations broadcast calls to arms that day, punctuated with the playing of “Dixie,” a mob of young whites converged on downtown.

Norman and his fellow participants sat for three hours as members of the mob took turns slathering them with mustard, salt and sugar.

After dragging them off their stools only to watch them come right back, the whites doused them with spray paint and then began to beat them with fists, brass knuckles and jagged pieces of broken sugar containers. They also burned them with cigarettes.

A former police officer named Benny Oliver knocked Norman off his stool and kicked him in the face, chest and abdomen. The attack ended when both were arrested. A photograph of the altercation was carried in many newspapers.

What happened that day in Jackson, as Taylor Branch noted in “Parting the Waters,” helped to fuel a growing energy and sense of purpose for civil rights activists and prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to begin considering a mass march on Washington.

Norman was the son of rural sharecroppers in Monroeville, Ala., who later moved to Mississippi. He earned an undergraduate degree from Tougaloo in 1964 and a master’s at University of Pittsburgh in 1988. His doctorate is from USC.

After he was drafted into the Army, he served in Vietnam. He joined the OMB as a budget examiner in 1971, retiring in 1999.

He is survived by Jeanette Gordon, his companion of 20 years; a brother; and a sister.