February First, Nineteen Sixty

It was a Monday. Four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University walked downtown to the F. W. Woolworth store on South Elm Street in Greensboro and bought a few small items: toothpaste, notebooks. They kept their receipts. Then they sat down at the lunch counter, the long curved counter that ran the length of the store, the counter that served white customers only.

Their names were Ezell Blair Junior, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond. They were eighteen and nineteen years old. A waitress told them the counter did not serve colored people. They said they had just spent money at other counters in this same store. They asked why their money was good on one side of the building and not the other. The waitress had no answer. The police arrived and said they could take no action. The store manager called his superiors. The four young men sat until the store closed for the day.

They came back the next morning with twenty students. The morning after that, more. Within a week, the counter had drawn hundreds of protesters. Within three months, the movement had spread to fifty-five cities across thirteen states. Seventy thousand Black and white participants would eventually join sit-ins that resulted in the desegregation of businesses across twenty states.

The Greensboro sit-ins were not the first. Nashville had sit-ins. Oklahoma City had sit-ins. What Greensboro had was a particular combination: four students who had planned carefully, a city that made national news, and a speed of spread that neither the store nor the city government had anticipated. Blair, McCain, McNeil, and Richmond became known as the Greensboro Four. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, formed two months later at Shaw University in Raleigh and guided by Ella Baker, grew directly from the model they established.

The Woolworth store on South Elm Street closed in nineteen ninety-three. The building where four teenagers sat down and refused to move now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which opened on February first, two thousand ten, exactly fifty years to the day.