The sit-in at Mel’s Drive-In garnered a large number of participants, from local college students to community activists, and became the first mass sit-in of the Bay Area Civil Rights Movement.(1) Among the local businesses in the Bay Area targeted for their discriminatory hiring practices was Mel’s Drive-In, a restaurant chain with locations in San Francisco and Berkeley co-owned by Mel Weiss and City Supervisor Harold Dobbs. African Americans were a minority in San Francisco, but racism limited job opportunities and had been prompted the creation in 1958 of a largely ineffective municipal Fair Employment Practices Committee. The Civil Rights Movement was expanding northward after major protests in the American South where most of the African American population was concentrated at the time. The 1963 protest at Mel’s Drive-in in response to racist hiring practices soon helped define the city’s reckoning of race-based employment discrimination amidst additional fights during the Civil Rights period, paving the way for additional demonstrations and greater change for the city’s African American residents.īy the 1960s, San Francisco’s widespread racist employment patterns ushered in a series of social protest movements led by the city’s progressives aimed at promoting equal rights and job opportunities for African American residents of the city. During the early years of the decade, however, the city entered a new wave of political upheaval as community members, activists, and organizations sought to secure equal employment opportunities for African Americans and other minority populations living in San Francisco. Photo: courtesy San Francisco State University collection Entering the 1960s, African Americans living in San Francisco continued to face significant discrimination in the area of employment, often excluded from occupations that interacted with the public, with few businesses open to hiring minorities in general.
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