The Bennett Belles: The Women Who Planned the Sit-In

The story that gets told is the story of four young men at a lunch counter. The story that often gets left out begins on the campus of Bennett College, a short distance away, weeks earlier.

Bennett College is one of only two women's historically Black colleges in the United States. It was founded in the basement of Warnersville Methodist Episcopal Church in eighteen seventy-three, by people who had recently been freed from enslavement, with the intention of educating teachers and community leaders. In nineteen twenty-six it became a college exclusively for women.

The Bennett Belles, as the students are called, were not peripheral to the Greensboro sit-in. They were central to it. Bennett women participated in the planning meetings with A&T students in the weeks before February first, nineteen sixty. They coordinated strategy. When the four men sat down and the movement began to grow, Bennett students were in the lines at the counter within days. At the height of the protests, more than forty percent of Bennett's student body had been jailed.

President Willa B. Player ran the college through all of it. When students were arrested, Player arranged for coursework to reach jailed students so they would not fall behind. She invited Martin Luther King Junior to speak at Bennett, telling skeptics that Bennett was a college where freedom rings, and so he could speak there. Player was one of the most consequential civil rights leaders in Greensboro, and she is among the least remembered.

The movement that began on February first could not have reached the scale it did without the organizational infrastructure that Bennett women built and sustained. The four men sat down at the counter. The women had already done much of the work to make that moment possible.