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Remember When, Chattanooga? Fire hoses blasted lunch-counter demonstrators here in 1960

Chattanooga firefighters turn fire hoses on demonstrators outside the F.W. Woolworth Co. store on Market Street in February 1960. Photo from the Chattanooga Free Press collection at ChattanoogaHistory.com.
Chattanooga firefighters turn fire hoses on demonstrators outside the F.W. Woolworth Co. store on Market Street in February 1960. Photo from the Chattanooga Free Press collection at ChattanoogaHistory.com. Chattanooga firefighters turn fire hoses on demonstrators outside the F.W. Woolworth Co. store on Market Street in February 1960. Photo from the Chattanooga Free Press collection at ChattanoogaHistory.com.

By Mark Kennedy 4 min read

This 1960 photograph of a fire hose being aimed at a downtown crowd is one of the iconic scenes of the civil rights era in Chattanooga.

Then-Chattanooga Mayor P.R. “Rudy” Olgiati ordered the crowd to be doused on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 1960, after several days of increasingly tense demonstrations at segregated lunch counters at downtown stores, according to news reports from the time.

An Associated Press reporter on the scene noted: “Olgiati stood in the middle of the street and watched the demonstration for about two hours before ordering the hose turned on the crowd.”

Some have seen parallels between these events 60 years ago and recent Chattanooga protests to promote social justice and policing reform tied to the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

This photograph is part of an archive of old Chattanooga Free Press images curated by local history buff Sam Hall at ChattanoogaHistory.com, a website that preserves and shares legacy photographs of the city.