The Four Men Before They Were History

Ezell Blair Junior grew up in Greensboro, the son of a high school teacher. His father had watched the Montgomery bus boycott from a distance and talked about it at the dinner table. By the time Blair enrolled at North Carolina A&T, he had already decided he wanted to do something. He later converted to Islam and changed his name to Jibreel Khazan.

Franklin McCain was from Washington, District of Columbia, the son of working parents who had sacrificed to send him to college. Joseph McNeil was from Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city that had seen some of the worst racial violence in the state's history, including the eighteen ninety-eight massacre, in which a white mob overthrew the city's elected government and killed dozens of Black residents. David Richmond was from Greensboro itself, the son of a mechanic.

The four had been talking for months about the contradiction of a store that welcomed Black customers at some counters and refused them at others. They had read about sit-in tactics tried elsewhere. The night before February first, nineteen sixty, they talked it through one more time in their dormitory. McCain later said he felt freer in the few seconds after he sat down at that counter than he had ever felt in his life.

After the sit-ins, the four went in different directions. McNeil became an Air Force officer and retired as a major general. Blair, under his new name, moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a teacher and counselor and later became an oral historian and lecturer. McCain became a chemist and later a community leader in Charlotte. Richmond died in nineteen ninety, at forty-nine, years before the museum that bore the name of their act would open. He did not live to see his photograph on the wall.