Black-History-Month
The Greenboro Four & the Sit-In Movement
On February 1st, 1960 after careful planning four students at North Carolina and Agricultural and Technical College: Ezell Blair Jr. (who later changed his name to Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond made small purchases at the Greensboro North Carolina Woolworth store, and then went to order food at the lunch counter. The lunch counter was “whites only” and they were refused service. The four men refused to leave, remaining in their seats at the counter doing their homework until the store closed.
The next day they returned and were joined by over twenty fellow students, including women from Bennett College. They were harassed, insulated, and threatened by white customers – and the store continued to refuse to serve them. On the second day reporters and TV camera crews came and the nation and the world could see and hear about the sit-in.
On the third day there were over sixty protesters, and on the fourth over three hundred. As the sit-in in Greensboro grew, it spread to other stores: first in Greensboro, then across North Carolina, by March sit-ins were taking place in Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; and Richmond, Virginia. The stores responded in quite different ways: by the end of February the lunch counter in the Kress store in Greensboro was integrated; other stores closed their lunch counters to avoid the protests. Finally, on the 25th of July, 1960 the Woolworth store in Greensboro served four Black employees at the lunch counter. They were the first Black people served at the Greensboro Woolworth store.
The sit-ins lead to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most influential organizations in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.