Sit-In At Woolworth’s

This year marks 50 years since four brave students sat down on stools at a Woolworth’s counter and helped usher in an important chapter in the civil rights movement.

The four—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr.—were students at Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, a historically black college in Greensboro. On February 1, 1960, they carried out a plan that they had been preparing for several weeks.

That day the students walked into a Woolworth’s in Greensboro and sat on stools that had always been reserved for white patrons. They asked to be served food but were refused service. The Woolworth’s staff—unsure of what to do in response—allowed the students to stay at the lunch counters where they sat peacefully.

Over the next few days, following a philosophy of nonviolent protest, hundreds of students from nearby colleges and schools would be inspired to join in the sit-ins at the Woolworth’s. Because of the efforts of the protestors, Woolworth’s caved in later that year and integrated its lunch counter.

The reverberations of the victory in Greensboro stretched all across the state, as sit-ins occurred in other cities, such as Winston-Salem, Charlotte and Raleigh. Eventually, similar protests were launched as far away as Tennessee and Virginia.

An important consequence of the Greensboro sit-ins was that it set in motion the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that challenged segregation in other public locations like libraries, parks and beaches.

Perhaps the most important effect of the Greensboro victory was the way it emboldened blacks to empower themselves through protest. In fact, Martin Luther King Jr. referred to the importance of the sit-in movement during his last speech the day before he died on April 4, 1968. To King, the students in the sit-in movement were doing more than merely ‘sitting down’:

“...And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

Adapted from Courage in Greensboro, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2010