Discover How Four Black College Students Sparked a Nationwide Civil Rights Movement, on This Date in 1960

On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, four college freshmen walked up to the lunch counter of a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and changed the course of history.

Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond were students at Agricultural & Technical College of North Carolina. All four were Black, and the lunch counters at Woolworth stores were reserved for “whites only.”

Wanting to draw attention to racial segregation and discrimination in the U.S. South, the students walked up to the L-shaped lunch counter and took a seat. Each then asked for a cup of coffee. They were all refused service. Staff called the police, but since McNeil, McCain, Blair and Richmond hadn’t done anything wrong and were paying customers (having purchased goods at the store’s non-segregated counter earlier that day), police officers decided not to take any action. In the meantime, local Greensboro merchant Ralph Johns, a white ally of the students who encouraged sit-ins as a form of protest, had already alerted the media. The four men stayed at the lunch counter until the store closed for the night.

The following day, the number of sit-in participants at Greensboro’s Woolworth lunch counter more than tripled, including female students from nearby Bennett College. By the fourth day, more than 300 people partook in the nonviolent protest. The numbers grew so large that the protest even spread to the lunch counter at S.H. Kress & Company, another Greensboro department store.

Reflections on the Greensboro Lunch Counter

Later dubbed the “Greensboro Four,” McNeil, McCain, Blair and Richmond had all been inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s tactics of nonviolence, an approach that consisted of principles including seeking to win the “friendship and understanding” of the opponent and a willingness to suffer without retaliating.

Their efforts proved fruitful. Soon enough, sit-in protests began taking place at segregated businesses throughout the South, including in other North Carolina cities like Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Durham, as well as states like Tennessee and Mississippi.

Some protesters were arrested; others were assaulted with water balloons and insults. But the act of civil disobedience remained one of peaceful protest, eventually forcing a policy change at Woolworth’s and other establishments.

The Greensboro Woolworth’s lost a reported $150,000 due to boycotts over the next five-and-a-half-months. Finally, manager Clarence Harris desegregated the store. On July 25, Harris asked three Black employees to change out of their work clothes and sit down at the counter to eat. They were the first Black customers to be served there, a monumental event that occurred quietly under the radar.

A portion of the original lunch counter remains in its original location, now part of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum. (Another section is on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.) The store is also a stop along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, a collection of landmarks across 15 states that played a vital role in advancing civil rights.

The Greensboro sit-in provided a template for nonviolent resistance and marked an early success for the civil rights movement. But it would take until 1964 for the Civil Rights Act to make desegregated public accommodation the law of the land.