The events on Monroe, North Carolina on October 28, 1958 took place in a time when black people were still largely living ‘separate but equal’ from white people, and not long after the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional which was the start of a lengthy process of overturning segregation. Many white parents were struggling with the notion of their children sharing a school with African Americans. While they could not change the court’s decision on children being in the same public schools, mixed-race relationships or crossing the color line concerning anything that could be seen as sexual was still extremely non-negotiable and unacceptable.

Therefore, when the eight-year-old white girl, Sissy Sutton, told her mother that a nine-year-old African American boy, Hanover Thompson, had kissed her on the cheek, her mother was enraged. She called the cops who violently arrested Hanover Thompson and his friend, David Simpson, who was witness to the ‘crime.’ They were sent to a reformatory with the possibility of release by the age of twenty-one and refused legal counsel. A Monroe local said, “If [black children] get into our rural schools and ride the buses with our white children, the Monroe ‘kissing’ incident is only a start of what we will have,” showing that the idea of shared public schools was increasing white people’s fear of desegregation on other levels. The case attracted global attention, and protests arose across Europe. Especially in the Netherlands, the Kissing Case gained a lot of media coverage. Operation Snowball is a clear example of historical overseas actions concerning racial protest.