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