Civil Rights Events

Sit-Ins

Nashville -- Accommodation

 

There were other arrests, other acts of violence, notably during the months of March and April 

 

The events of February 27 did not put-off student demonstrators – if anything, it spurred them on. They also received more support from [previously neutral] students who were appalled by their treatment. Such events attracted even more media attention and by April 1960, the leadership of the sit-ins decided to expand their movement so that they boycotted all downtown businesses in Nashville associated with segregation. The action was so successful that it is calculated that 98% of the African American population in Nashville took part in the boycott (Trueman 4).

 

On March 3 Mayor Ben West appointed a seven-member biracial committee to investigate segregation in the city. Despite the committee’s numerous attempts at a compromise, the students declared that they would accept nothing less than the acknowledgement of their rights to sit at the store lunch counters along with white customers. On April 5, the committee suggested that the counters be divided into black and white sections. [Whites would occupy counter stool from one end of the row while Blacks occupied stools beginning at the opposite end of the row] The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), which worked with the Nashville Student Movement, rejected the proposal, arguing that segregation of the counters was no better than black exclusion from them (Momodu 2-3).

 

One of the important phases of the movement in Nashville [Diane Nash years later declared] was the economic withdrawal, where the oppressed people really withdraw their participation from their own oppression. So there was a withdrawal of shopping, by the blacks, and by whites who agreed with us, and who would participate, from the downtown area, that while blacks couldn't be served at the lunch counters or in the restaurants of the department stores, we didn't shop downtown at all. That was the height of the Easter shopping season, which used to be even important to, to retail merchants than they are now. Everybody used to get brand new Easter outfits, that … could possibly afford to. And that boycott was, I think, about 98% effective, or more, among blacks in Nashville. So that the next time — when we began negotiating with the merchants again, they were much more interested in talking to us than they had been the first time (Interview Nash 10).

 

On April 19, a bomb destroyed the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the defense attorney representing many of the protesters. The bombing triggered a mass march.   John Lewis remembered: One of the attorneys that had been defending us, I think it was April 19, 1960, about six o'clock in the morning, the home of Z. Alexander Looby, he was one of the attorneys for the Legal Defense Fund, who taught part-time at Fisk, his home was bombed. He lived across the street from Meharry Medical College and the bomb impact broke the windows of the school. About seven o'clock we had a meeting with this group of students called the Central Committee of the Nashville Student Movement, which represented students from Fisk, American Baptist, Tennessee State, Peabody, Vanderbilt. We all met and decided that we would have a mass march on City Hall in response to the bombing of Attorney Looby's home. We sent the mayor a telegram saying to him to meet us on the steps of the City Hall by noon. By noon, we had more than five thousand students and community people marching on City Hall and the mayor came and spoke (Interview Lewis 9).

 

Diane Nash related: Attorney Looby was a very, very respected man in the community. He had a reputation of defending people who didn't have enough money to adequately pay him, and of being a really decent human being. And quite by accident, the student central committee had a meeting scheduled for six a.m. that morning. And I remember I was up, getting dressed to go to the meeting, when I heard the explosion.

 

…

 

The students met on Tennessee A&I's campus, and we marched, I think, three abreast. We were very organized. One of the things that we made it a point of was that whenever there was a demonstration, we were to be overly dressed. The men generally wore suits and ties, and the women — we looked like we were dressing up for Sunday. And anyway, we marched quietly — we were met later by students at Fisk. We passed Fisk campus. And other students, other schools had points where they joined in to the march. There were many thousands of people that marched that day. We marched silently, really. And the — the long line of students must have continued for many, many blocks. Miles, maybe. And we marched to the mayor's office.  … We had sent telegrams ahead of time, telling him that as a result of the bombing, turning the Looby home into a state of violence, tension, violence in the city of Nashville, we felt like we needed to talk …. So we met him on the steps of City Hall. And confronted him with what his feelings as a man, were. As a person. I was particularly interested in that, as opposed to just his being a mayor (Interview Nash 12, 14, 15).

 

Nash asked Mayor West if it was wrong for a citizen of Nashville to discriminate against his fellow citizens because of his race or skin color. The mayor admitted that it was wrong, giving the students an important symbolic victory in their campaign. Nash then asked the mayor if the lunch counters in Nashville should be desegregated. The mayor said they should (Momodu 5).

 

I have a lot of respect for the way he responded. He didn't have to respond the way he did. He said, that he felt like it was wrong, for citizens of Nashville to be discriminated against at the lunch counters, solely on the basis of the color of their skin. … I think that was the turning point.  The Nashville newspaper reported that, in the headlines, the next day …  (Interview Nash 15).

 

Weeks of secret negotiations resulted.  Diane Nash and the other student committee members tried to understand the merchants’ reservations, one important reservation being that there might be a boycott by whites at the lunch counters, if they began to serve blacks. And we started really strategizing how we could avoid that. So, some of the whites in Nashville …  who recognized that it was important to desegregate the city, figured into …the strategy, because they made it a point to sit next to the blacks, who were being served, so that there could not be a white boycott. So, those kinds of experiences made me really look at the fact that bringing about social change through violence is probably not … as realistic. Because, who do you kill? Do you kill all whites? That doesn't make sense, because we had whites who were our opposition the first year, who the second year… took an attitude … it's not that bad, in fact, it really makes sense.   … they were helpful to us the second year, in bringing about desegregation (Interview Nash 16).

 

On May 10, six downtown stores opened their lunch counters to black customers for the first time; the customers arrived in groups of two or three during the afternoon and were served without incident. With that agreement, Nashville became the first major southern city to begin desegregating public facilities (Momodu 6).

 

Whereas the bus boycott in Montgomery had been successful because of its economic clout, there had been no overt comment by anyone within the city’s authority about the immorality of segregation. For a mayor to do this, combined with the impact on a city’s local economy, was a major achievement for a state such as Tennessee.

 

The story of the Nashville sit-ins did not end with the desegregation of lunch counters. Towards the end of 1960, a number of the leaders of the movement helped to found the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). Diane Nash became a full-time SNCC field worker while John Lewis was elected the leader of SNCC in 1962. …

 

Several of the SNCC leaders, who had honed their leadership skills during the sit-ins, became involved in the Freedom Rides. The sit-in leaders were also involved in helping to organize the Selma to Montgomery march.

 

Most of those who led the sit-ins became major figures in the civil rights campaign. Diane Nash was appointed to a national committee by J F Kennedy that promoted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. John Lewis was elected to Congress in 1986 after two decades of being recognized as one of the civil rights movement’s major figures.

 

The Rev James Lawson – who taught about the importance of a non-violent campaign – was expelled from Vanderbilt University Divinity School for his part in the sit-ins – but has since been honoured by the university (Trueman 5-6).

 

 

Works cited:

 

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview.  Washington University Digital Gateway Texts.  November 12, 1985.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/nas0015.0267.075dianenash.html

 

“Interview with John Lewis.”  Southern Oral History Program Collection.  Documenting the American South.  November 20, 1973.  Web.   https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/A-0073.html

 

Momodu, Samuel.  “Nashville Sit-Ins (1960).”  BlackPast.org.  Web.  http://www.blackpast.org/aah/nashville-sit-ins-1960.

 

Trueman, C. N.  “Nashville Sit Ins.”  historylearningsite.co.uk.  March 27, 2015.  Web.  https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-civil-rights-movement-in-america-1945-to-1968/nashville-sit-ins/.



Civil Rights Events

Sit-Ins

Nashville -- Opposing Values Collide

 

Just shy of 22 years old, Diane Nash became one of the leaders in the Nashville Student Central Committee, which would organize the actual sit-ins at discriminatory restaurants throughout the city.  Leading up to her first sit-in, in February 1960, Nash worried about being arrested. She’d voiced her concern in the workshops, saying that she’d help with phone calls and organizing but in the end, she would not go to jail. “But when the time came, I went,” she says, of the dozens of arrests she’d face in the not too distant future (Morgan 1)
.

We felt we were right. We felt we were right, and rational. When we took a position that segregation was, was wrong, and we really tried to be open and honest and loving with our opposition. A person who is being truthful and honest, actually is, is standing in a much more powerful position than a person who's lying, or trying to maintain his preference, even though on some level he knows he's wrong. I think, on some level, most people really deep-down know that segregation was wrong, just based on race, and disregarding everything else about the person (Interview Nash 5).

Well, the first time [February 13] we took a seat at a lunch counter [John Lewis recalled] and we were denied service, they said, "We don't serve you; you can't be served." It was a great feeling; it was my first real act of protesting against this system of segregation. I sort of had this feeeling for some time that you just wanted to strike a blow for freedom and this was a great sense of pride to be able to sit down and at the same time become part of an organized effort (Interview Lewis 4).

Diane Nash recalled her feelings of anticipation before sitting down in protest. People used to tickle me, talking about how brave I was, sitting in, and marching, and what have you, because I was so scared. All the time. It was like wall-to-wall terrified. I can remember sitting in class, many times, before demonstrations, and I knew, like, we were going to have a demonstration that afternoon. And the palms of hands would be so sweaty, and I would be so tense and tight inside. I was really afraid. The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew were there. Like courage, and love for people. It was a real experience, to be among a group of people who would put their bodies between you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough, that you would put yours between them and danger.

…

… the first sit-in we had, was really funny, because the waitresses were nervous. And they must have dropped $2,000 worth of dishes that day ....  I mean, literally, it was almost a cartoon. Because I can remember one in particular, she, she was so nervous, she picked up dishes and she dropped one and, and she'd pick up another one, and she'd drop it and another. It was really funny, and we were sitting there trying not to laugh, because we thought that, that laughing would be insulting and you know, we didn't want to create that kind of atmosphere. At the same time, we were scared to death (Interview Nash 5-6).

The students continued their sit-in efforts. Interviewed years later, John Lewis revealed that they occupied lunch counter stools on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “We didn't have any classes on those days and we continued to go down to the lunch counters and restaurants to sit in.”

 

We would continue to sit and some days we would stay all day and take turns. A shift of students would stay there until they were forced to close the lunch counters completely. Or we would occupy all of the seats. In some instances, stores like Woolworth's and Kress's, McClelland's, would just close the stores. And that continued for a period of time (Interview Lewis 5).

The protest soon attracted the support of other students (black and white) and the numbers soon went into the hundreds. The organisers of the sit-in were concerned that not all those involved in the protest had been schooled in non-violent techniques (Trueman 1).

 

There were people who couldn't take it [John Lewis later stated], couldn't take the discipline. But they did other things, like picking people up and taking them to the meeting places, or passing out leaflets, or making signs. But they couldn't handle putting themselves in positions where they could be attacked or arrested. And it was good that they knew that (Nance 1).

 

 Therefore, two students, Bernard Layfayette and John Lewis, produced a handout for all those involved with their ’10 Rules of Conduct’. These were the required standards for all those who were supporting the protest. The rules stated:

 

Do Not:

 

Strike back nor curse if abused … Hold conversations with a floor walker. Leave your seat until your leader has given you permission to do so. Block entrances to stores outside nor the aisles inside.

 

Do:

 

Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times Sit straight: always face the counter. Report all serious incidents to your leader. Refer information seekers to your leader in a polite manner. Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Love and non-violence is the way.

 

Towards the end of February, the mood of the store managers had become more ugly and supporters of segregation gathered at the stores concerned, along with the demonstrators (Trueman 1-2).

 

The first violent response to the protests came on February 27 ….  The protesters were attacked by a white group opposed to desegregation. The police arrested eighty-one protesters; none of the attackers was arrested. Those arrested were found guilty of disorderly conduct. They all decided to serve time in jail rather than pay fines.

 

This was a day [John Lewis divulged] when we had been warned by a local white minister, Will Campbell, who had told us he had word from a reliable source that we would be arrested and that there would be some form of violence. A small group of us, on that day—it was a cold day in Nashville, we even had snow—on that particular day, went down and started sitting in at Woolworth's and later during the day there was some violence on the part of a young white teenager who pulled students off the seats or put lighted cigarettes down their backs, that type of thing. We continued to sit (Interview Lewis 5-6).

Lewis had been hit.   He escaped having a lighted cigarette put down his back.

Diane Nash found something amusing in her day’s experience.  The day that the police first arrested us was interesting too, because their attitude, they had made a decision they were going to arrest us if we sat-in that day, and so, they announced to us "O.K., all you nigras, get up from the lunch counter or we're going to arrest you". And their attitude was like, well, we warned you. So they repeated it a couple of times, and nobody moved. And of course, we were prepared for this. So they said, "Well, we warned you, you won't move, O.K. Everybody's under arrest." So we all get up and marched to the wagon.  But everybody who was at the lunch counter was arrested. So then the police had the attitude like, O.K., we warned them, they didn't listen. And then they turned and they looked around the lunch counter again, and the second wave of students had all taken seats. And they were confounded, kind of looked at each other like, "now what do we do", you know? They said well, O.K., we'll arrest those too, and they did it. Then the third wave. No matter what they did and how many they arrested, there was still a lunch counter full of students, there (Interview Nash 7).

 

“We refused to strike back,” John Lewis recalled.  I think studying and attending the nonviolence workshops we had been disciplined to understand, to be willing to adjust to the violence, the pain and the hurt. At the same time we didn't concentrate on what happened to us. But we were there for a purpose and the arrest. It just sort of inspired us. I didn't have any bad feelings about it. I didn't necessarily want to go to jail. But we knew, in a sense, using that particular method really as a tactic at that point that it would help solidify the student community and the black community as a whole. The student community did rally. The people heard that we had been arrested and before the end of the day, five hundred students made it into the downtown area to occupy other stores and restaurants. At the end of the day ninety-eight of us were in jail. There were mass meetings all over the city that Sunday. We refused to come out of jail. We didn't want anyone to go our bond. But early Sunday morning, the colleges and universities there had put up the necessary bail money and we were let go (Interview Lewis 7).

 

Works cited:

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview.  Washington University Digital Gateway Texts.  November 12, 1985.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/nas0015.0267.075dianenash.html

 

“Interview with John Lewis.”  Southern Oral History Program Collection.  Documenting the American South.  November 20, 1973.  Web.   https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/A-0073.html

 

Morgan, Thad.  “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.”  History.  March 8, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/news/diane-nash-freedom-rider-civil-rights-movement.

Nance, Kevin.  “John Lewis on 'March: Book One. “  Chicago Tribune.  August 23, 2013.  Web.  http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-xpm-2013-08-23-ct-prj-0825-march-john-lewis-20130823-story.html

 

Trueman, C. N.  “Nashville Sit Ins.”  historylearningsite.co.uk.  March 27, 2015.  Web.  https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-civil-rights-movement-in-america-1945-to-1968/nashville-sit-ins/.



Civil Rights Events

Sit-Ins

Nashville -- Gearing Up

 

The Nashville Sit-Ins, which lasted from February 13 to May 10, 1960, were among the earliest non-violent direct action campaigns in the 1960s to end racial segregation in the South. They were the first campaigns to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. The sit-in campaign was coordinated by the Nashville Student Movement and Nashville Christian Leadership Council, which was made up primarily of students from Fisk University, American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tennessee State University. Diane Nash and John Lewis, who were both students at Fisk University, emerged as the major leaders of the local movement (Momodu 1).

 

Diane Nash would say in an interview: You know, I heard about the Little Rock story, on the radio. … I remember the Emmett Till situation really keenly, in fact, even now I can, I have a good image of that picture that appeared in Jet magazine, of him. And they made an impression. However, I had never traveled to the south at that time. And I didn't have an emotional relationship to segregation. I had – I understood the facts, and the stories, but there was not an emotional relationship. When I actually went south, and actually saw signs that said "white" and "colored" and I actually could not drink out of that water fountain, or go to that ladies' room, I had a real emotional reaction.  I remember the first time it happened, was at the Tennessee State Fair. And I had a date with this, this young man. And I started to go the ladies' room. And it said, "white and colored" and I really resented that. I was outraged. So, it, it had a really emotional effect (Interview Nash 1-2).

 

Diane Nash was born in 1938 and raised in Chicago, away from the strong racial divisions that saw African Americans treated as second-class citizens under Jim Crow laws in the South. It wasn’t until she enrolled at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1959 that she came face-to-face with overt discrimination.

“There were signs that said white, white-only, colored. [The] library was segregated, the public library. Parks, swimming pools, hotels, motels,” she recalls. “I was at a period where I was interested in expanding: going new places, seeing new things, meeting new people. So that felt very confined and uncomfortable.”

Among the many facilities that weren’t available to Nash and her peers were restaurants that served black customers only on a “takeout basis,” which meant they weren’t allowed to sit and eat inside. Instead, black patrons were forced to eat along the curbs and alleys of Nashville during the lunch hour (Morgan 1).

John Lewis grew up in rural Alabama on a farm in Pike County about forty or fifty miles from Montgomery in a strictly segregated world. You had the white world and the black world. Segregated school bus [unclear]. In '57, I went to Nashville to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary to study, with my great desire to come to Atlanta to study at Morehouse but my parents couldn't afford it. I could go to the Seminary and work and so I enrolled in it (Interview Lewis 1).

I grew up about 50 miles from Montgomery. Growing up there as a young child, I tasted the bitter fruits of racism. I saw the signs that said white men, colored men; white women, colored women; white waiting, colored waiting. And I would ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents why. They would say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t go getting in trouble.”

 

But in 1955, at 15 years old, I heard of Dr. King, and I heard of Rosa Parks. They inspired me to get in trouble. I remember meeting Rosa Parks as a student. In 1957, I wrote Dr. King a letter and told him that I wanted to attend a little [whites-only] college 10 miles from my home—Troy State College, known today as Troy University. I submitted my application and my high-school transcript. I never heard a word from the school, so that gave me the idea that I should write Dr. King.

 

In the meantime, I had been accepted to a little college in Nashville, Tennessee, so I went off to school there. King heard that I was there and got in touch with me. He told me that when I was back home for spring break, to go and see him in Montgomery.

 

…

 

A young lawyer met me at the Greyhound bus station and drove me to the First Baptist Church—pastored by Ralph Abernathy—and ushered me into the office. I saw Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy standing behind a desk and was so scared that I didn’t know what to do. Dr. King said, “Are you the boy from Troy? Are you John Lewis?” And I said, “I am John Robert Lewis”—I gave my whole name. And he still called me “the boy from Troy”! He told me to go back and have a discussion with my mother and my father. He said they could lose their land; their home could be burned or bombed. But if I got the okay from them, we would file a suit against Troy State and against the state of Alabama, and I would get admitted to the school. I had a discussion with my mother and my father, and they were terribly afraid, so I continued to study in Nashville (Newkirk II 1-2).

 

During the school year of '58 and '59, Lewis started attending nonviolent workshops conducted by James Lawson, a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

 

Jim Lawson [Diane Nash recalled] was a very interesting person. He had been to India, and he had studied the movement, Mohandas Gandhi, in India. He also had been a conscientious objector, and had refused to fight in the Korean War. And he really is the person that brought Gandhi's philosophy and strategies of non-violence to this country. And he conducted weekly workshops, where students in Nashville, as well as some of the people who lived in the Nashville community, were really trained and educated in these philosophies, and strategies. I remember we used to role-play, and we would do things like actually sit-in, pretending we were sitting at lunch counters, in order to prepare ourselves to do that. And we would practice things such as how to protect your head from a beating, how to protect each other, if one person was taking a severe beating, we would practice other people putting their bodies in between that person and the violence. So that the violence could be more distributed and hopefully no one would get seriously injured. We would practice not striking back, if someone struck us.  There were many things that I learned in those workshops, that I not only was able to put into practice at the time that we were demonstrating and so forth, but that I have used for the rest of my life (Interview Nash 3).

 

Lawson’s students actually ventured out to segregated stores and restaurants to do nothing more than speak with the manager when they were refused service. “Lawson graded their interactions in each simulation and sit-in, reminding them to have love and compassion for their harassers” (Diane 2).

 

You know, we had, after — during the workshops, we had begun what we called testing the lunch counters. We had actually sent teams of people into department store restaurants, to attempt to be served, and we had anticipated that we'd be refused, and we were. And we established the fact that we were not able to be served, and we asked to speak to the manager, and engaged him in a conversation about, why not, the fact that it really was immoral to discriminate against people because of their skin color.

 

…

 

The first time we talked to the merchants, their attitude, well, you wanted a meeting, here, we're having it. They listened to what we had to say, they very quickly said no, we can't do it, and then their attitude was like, we're busy men, we're ready for the meeting to be over. That's it, no, we can't have desegregation.

 

 And then Christmas break had happened. And we had intended to start the demonstrations afterwards, and we hadn't really started up again. So when the students in Greensboro sat-in on February 1, we simply made plans to join their effort by sitting-in at the same chains that — that they sat-in at (Interview Nash 3-4).

 

We came back after the Christmas holidays and continued to have the workshops. Right after February first, second, or third we received a telephone call from students in North Carolina saying, "What can you do to support the students in Greensboro (Interview Lewis 3).

 

On February 13, 1960, twelve days after the Greensboro sit-ins occurred, local college students entered S.H. Kress, Woolworth’s, and McClellan stores at 12:40 p.m. in downtown Nashville. After making their purchases at the stores, the students sat-in at the lunch counters.  Store owners initially refused to serve the students and closed the counters, claiming it was their “moral right” to determine whom they would or would not serve. The students continued the sit-ins over the next three months, expanding their targets to include lunch counters at the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals, Grant’s Variety Store, Walgreens, and major Nashville department stores, Cain-Sloan and Harvey (Momodu 6).

 

 

Works cited:

“Diane Nash.”  AJC.  Web.   https://www.ajc.com/news/national/diane-nash/7bAodNsSPqTDcEOVCkvgdK/.

 

“Interview with Diane Nash.” Eyes on the Prize Interview.  Washington University Digital Gateway Texts.  November 12, 1985.  Web.  http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/nas0015.0267.075dianenash.html

 

“Interview with John Lewis.”  Southern Oral History Program Collection.  Documenting the American South.  November 20, 1973.  Web.   https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/A-0073.html

 

Momodu, Samuel.  “Nashville Sit-Ins (1960).”  BlackPast.org.  Web.  http://www.blackpast.org/aah/nashville-sit-ins-1960.

Morgan, Thad.  “How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South.”  History.  March 8, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/news/diane-nash-freedom-rider-civil-rights-movement.

Newkirk II, Vann R.  “How Martin Luther King Jr. Recruited John Lewis.”  The Atlantic.  King Issue.  Web.  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/john-lewis-martin-luther-king-jr/552581/



Civil Rights Events

Sit-Ins

Greensboro



The Greensboro Sit-Ins occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, lasting from February 1, 1960 to July 25, 1960.  Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil, the original protestors, became known as the Greensboro Four.  All were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College.  They had read about nonviolent protest, and one of them, Ezell Blair, had seen a documentary on the life of Mohandas Gandhi. Another of the four, Joseph McNeil, worked part-time in the university library with Eula Hudgens, an alumna of the school who had participated in freedom rides; McNeil and Hudgens regularly discussed nonviolent protest. All four of the students befriended white businessman, philanthropist, and social activist Ralph Johns, a benefactor of both the NAACP and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (Murray 1).

 

Joseph McNeil had grown up in New York.  What he had experienced returning to college after the holidays had inspired him to take action against local, blatant racial discrimination.

 

My parents lived in New York City at the time, and I was home on winter break. And I was coming back to North Carolina, and I was riding a Greyhound bus. And something strange started to happen to me after I left New York. I mean, I was the same person when I got to Philadelphia that I was on 125th Street, but it seemed that the further south I went, the more differently people started to view me. I had changed, boy, but they were changing. So by the time I got to Richmond, Virginia, and I was hungry, I went to a restaurant in the terminal and asked to be served. And they said 'We can't serve you here- you have to go around the corner there.' And for me, that was the final blow of humiliation. And I had had enough. And I made up my mind that I had to do something.

 

Ezell Blair (Jibreel Khazan) was the first to hear about McNeil's experience:

 

'All right Junior Blair, wake up!'

 

'Joe, what’s going on man?'

 

'You know what happened to me?'

 

'No what happened to you?'

 

'I came from Richmond Virginia, man, by the time I got to Richmond I felt like I was a slave, man.'

 

(He walked all the way about a mile from the bus station at 11:30 and I was the guy who got the brunt of it. So I know exactly what he’s saying is true.)

 

I said, 'Well, Joe man, what can we do?'

 

He said, 'We got to do something man I’m so sick and tired of race discrimination.' He said, 'We have got to act man.'

 

So about a week or so (later), Frank, David, and Joseph and myself in the room, we said, 'We have got to make some plans. What are we going to do? Time to act.'

 

Franklin McCain said before the sit-in, no one on campus would have pegged them as leaders (Jones 1).

 

The first sit-in was meticulously planned and executed. While all four students had considered different means of nonviolent protest, McNeil suggested the tactic of the sit-in to the other three. To him, discipline in executing the protest was paramount. Months before the sit-in, he attended a concert at which other African-American students behaved tactlessly, leaving him determined not to repeat their error. The plan for the protest was simple. The students would first stop at Ralph Johns’ store so that Johns could contact a newspaper reporter. They would then go to the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store to purchase items, saving their receipts. After finishing their shopping, they would sit down at the lunch counter and courteously request service, and they would wait until service was provided (Murray 2).

 

Everyone knew there were risks involved.  In an interview years later, Ezell Blair said:

 

I was the one that didn’t want to go down on Sunday night January 31st, because I was worried about getting hurt. I went home and said:

 

Mom, Dad, (I knew they were going to save me), no boy your grades are failing, no, boy, you better stay out of that.' But they went along with Frank and Joe!

 

[They said], 'You go down tomorrow, we’ll say our blessings for you. Oh by the way, I want you to dress like you’re going to church.'

 

[I said] 'I want to wear overalls.

 

[She said] 'Who’s your mother?'

 

[I said] 'You are.'

 

[She said] 'You do what I tell you.'

 

[I said:] 'Yes Ma. Okay. But suppose I get killed?'

 

She said: 'You’ll be dressed to kill! Mothers are always right (Jones 2-4).

 

The protest occurred on Monday, February 1, 1960.  The students were refused service.

An older white woman sat at the lunch counter a few stools down from McCain and his friends.

 

"And if you think Greensboro, N.C., 1960, a little old white lady who eyes you with that suspicious look ... she's not having very good thoughts about you nor what you're doing," McCain says.

 

Eventually, she finished her doughnut and coffee. And she walked behind McNeil and McCain — and put her hands on their shoulders.

 

"She said in a very calm voice, 'Boys, I am so proud of you. I only regret that you didn't do this 10 years ago.'" McCain recalls.

 

"What I learned from that little incident was ... don't you ever, ever stereotype anybody in this life until you at least experience them and have the opportunity to talk to them. I'm even more cognizant of that today — situations like that — and I'm always open to people who speak differently, who look differently, and who come from different places," he says (Norris 1).

 

The manager of the Woolworth’s store requested that they leave the premises. After they had left the store, the four students told campus leaders at Agricultural and Technical what had happened.   The next morning twenty-nine neatly dressed male and female North Carolina Agricultural and Technical students sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. The protest grew the following day, and on Thursday, white students from a nearby women’s college took part in the protests, which expanded to other stores. Soon crowds of students were mobbing local lunch counters. As the protests grew, opposition grew vociferous. Crowds of white men began appearing at lunch counters to harass the protesters, often by spitting, uttering abusive language, and throwing eggs. In one case, a protester’s coat was set on fire, and the assailant was arrested.

 

The protests continued each day that week. On Saturday, fourteen hundred students arrived at the Greensboro Woolworth’s store. Those who could not sit at the lunch counter formed picket lines outside the store. A phoned-in bomb threat cut the protest short, but the following week sit-ins began at Woolworth’s stores in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Durham. Soon other five-and-dime and department stores with segregated lunch counters became targets of these protests.

 

The reaction of police departments in the region was, by and large, muted. In the case of the Greensboro Woolworth’s sit-ins, protesters were left alone by the police department while those reactionaries who became violent were prosecuted. Statewide no protesters were arrested until forty-one black students in a picket line at the Cameron Village Woolworth’s in Raleigh were charged with trespassing (Murray 3-4).

 

The sit-in movement spread to Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; and Richmond, Virginia, by early March.  … The Greensboro Woolworth’s finally served blacks at its lunch counter on July 25, 1960, when manager Clarence Harris asked four black Woolworth’s employees—Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones, and Charles Best—to change out of their uniforms and into street clothes. The employees then ordered a meal at the lunch counter, becoming the first African Americans to be served at Woolworth’s. Most lunch counters around Greensboro would be desegregated over the next few weeks (Momodu 3-4).

 

Interviewed years later, Joseph McNeil reflected.

 

When we had these sit-ins and we faced the prospect of being arrested and going to jail, we didn’t know for how long it was going to be, or whether we were going to jail for one day or one week or six months or one year. We were students! But we were very serious students.

 

We cared about life and our future. But we knew that we had to do this one stand. We had to take on this one thing.

 

Franklin McCain recalled facing plenty of doubts when the foursome first shared their ambitions with fellow students.

 

"Never request permission to start a revolution," he said. "We had talked to several students about this fractured and unequal democracy and what we wanted to do about it and, quite honestly, most people thought we were crazy."

 

In particular, McCain says, he was stirred into defiance by "the big lie" his parents had passed on to him about how to succeed as an African-American. As a youngster, McCain embraced the Ten Commandments, sought a good education and did good deeds with no expectation of reward, just as his parents had imparted.

 

"When I turned 13 or 14, I saw that I'd been screwed. I was still denied the rights and privileges that were to be afforded citizens of this country," he said. "I was angry as hell at a system that I felt had betrayed me."

 

McNeil said he and his fellow protesters were not daunted by attempts to intimidate them -- not even those of the Ku Klux Klan.

 

"For the most part, we were too angry to be too fearful," he said. "The heckling and all those things were a concern, but I think it made us stronger for the process.

"The fact that you could get people to go back into harm's way day after day and take physical abuse and verbal abuse is a testament to the fact that we were responding on solid principles and morals" (Cherry and Grinberg 1-3).

 

McNeil believed their actions had been about choice.  “It was about having the ability to say I choose to sit down. Or I choose to drink from that water fountain.

 

I don’t choose black water or white water or colored water. I want water.”

 

He said that living under Jim Crow was “so intolerable that he felt he had no other option but to seek an end to segregation.”

 

I was not angry at people in particular. I was angry at a system that I thought betrayed me. It was a farce. And I credit my three colleagues- probably- with saving my life. Because deep in my heart, I felt as though if that was what life had to offer, then I'm not sure it's worth living (Jones 2-3).

 

The goal of the Greensboro Four accomplished, McNeil was elated.  Interviewed years later, McNeil said he felt obligated to visit Woolworth's one last time for "ceremonial" reasons when he returned to school in September 1960.

 

"I ordered coffee and pie," he said. "I never did that again. The pie wasn't very good" (Cherry and Grinberg 4).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Cherry, Matt and Grinberg, Emanuella.  “Sit-in vet: 'Never request permission to start a revolution'.”  CNN.  February 1, 2010.  Web.  http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/01/greensboro.four.sitins/index.html

 

Jones, Jessica.  “Three of the Four Greensboro Four: In Their Own Words.”  WUNC.  North Carolina Public Radio.  January 10, 2014.  Web.  https://www.wunc.org/post/three-greensboro-four-their-own-words

 

Momodu, Samuel.  “Greensboro Sit-Ins (1960).”  BlackPast.Org.  Web.  https://blackpast.org/aah/greensboro-sit-ins-1960

 

Murray, Jonathan.  “Greensboro Sit-In.”  North Carolina History Project.  Web.  http://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/greensboro-sit-in/

 

Norris, Michele.  “The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement.”  NPR.  February 1, 2008.  Web.  https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18615556