There was no charismatic leader that day, no eloquent preacher, no carefully
planned campaign. Just four young guys, freshmen no less, from an obscure
public college for Negros, the Agricultural and Technical College of North
Carolina. One afternoon, February 1,
1960, they ambled over to downtown Greensboro where they causally plopped
themselves down on four stools of a Woolworths Luncheonette. They ordered coffee. Very politely.
In those days before chain fast food joints, the lunch
counters at Woolworths, other dime
stores and drug stores were the top
options for an inexpensive, quick meal
while running errands in the still thriving down towns of American towns
and cities. Woolworths, like other chains, had a policy of “honoring local
custom and law.” In the South that meant they would not serve Blacks. That in turn meant employees of down town business as well
as customers of those stores who
happened to be Black often had no place to grab a hot lunch or rest their feet.
It was an injustice. Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell
Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel
Khazan), and David Richmond
decided to do something about it. So
they ordered coffee. The waitresses at the counter informed them
that they could not serve Coloreds. They politely told her that they intended to stay until they were served.
So they sat until closing, enduring the taunts and jeers of white customers. When the store closed, they returned to the
campus with the promise to return.
On the second day McNeil and McCain
returned to the lunch counter with two other students. This time a TV camera man was on hand to film their defiance. Articles
appeared in the local press. Word was getting out. Crowds of angry whites began to mill about
the store.
On day three about sixty people from the college and
community turned out in support of the rotating cast of young men in those four
stools. Word of the protest made national headlines and mention on the network evening news programs. Woolworth’s corporate headquarters issued a statement promising to continue to
honor local custom.
More than 300 turned out on day four
and the sit-in was extended to another lunch counter at a local Kress store.
Lunch counter sit-ins spread across the South and continued for years.
On May 28, 1963 these Black and White Civil Rights volunteers were
abused in Jackson, Mississippi.
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By the end of the week black college
students had spread the sit-ins to Woolworth stores in Winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh, and Charlotte as well as towns in other states. The
Greensboro Four, as the original protestors came to be called, had sparked a largely spontaneous movement.
It was not that sit-ins were unknown. The first in the South had been more than
twenty years earlier in 1939 as a protest in the Alexandria, Virginia public
library. In the late 1940’s the Quaker Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) which was urging the adoption of Gandhian non-violent resistance, began to use the tactic sparingly. In the early 1950’s volunteers from the Congress
for Racial Equality (CORE) who
had been trained by the FOR’s Bertrand
Russell and others used sit-in protests in Northern and borders state
cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore. But in the
mid-‘50’s civil rights protest had
moved to business boycotts, voter registration campaigns, and mass marches. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and their allies at the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had spread this brand of protest
successfully in high profile campaigns.
But something about the Sit-in
protests struck a chord with both
the public and with newly empowered activists.
The movement spread to cities throughout the South. In Nashville
FOR trained pacifist James Lawson
had already trained a disciplined cadre of
students in the tactics of passive
resistance who spread out over the city and surrounding area with a well-coordinated campaign.
Meanwhile the original Greensboro
students decided to declare a nationwide
boycott of Woolworths and were supported by volunteers from existing civil
rights organizations including the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.) Pickets showed up at stores across the country.
In far off Cheyenne, Wyoming I was
11 years old and encountered my first demonstrator
of any kind—one lone guy in a sandwich board sign outside the
downtown Woolworths where I used to go for lunch every Saturday. After a gruff beginning, “What are you
staring at, kid?” I was informed about the boycott. I had seen footage of the sit-ins on TV. I was sympathetic. It was the first picket line I refused to cross.
Maybe the loss of an 11 year old’s once-a-week
lunch money, didn’t harm the company, but the boycott was cutting deeply into profits. Woolworths stores
were Stone Age discount houses and
were the preferred shopping places of
poor Blacks across the south and in the big cities of the North. Whites could afford the upscale downtown Department
Stores. Woolworths found its sales off as much as 30% in key cities.
The chain was also taking a beating in the court of public opinion, especially in
the north. Highly respected President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed
that he was, “deeply sympathetic with efforts of any group to enjoy the
rights…of equality that they are guaranteed by the Constitution,” when asked
directly about the sit-ins during a news
conference.
In Nashville Lawton’s campaign paid
off when they won city-wide
desegregation of lunch counters in May.
In other towns local merchants
capitulated as the boycotts and sit-ins ate into the bottom line.
On July 25 the Greensboro Woolworth threw in the towel. That day they served their own Black
employees for the first time. The next
day the lunch counter was officially
opened to Backs not only in that town, but across the entire chain.
Freedom Riders in 1961 evacuate their bus after it was set on fire.
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In the next few years the sit-in
tactic was applied to all sorts of
struggles for equal access to public accommodation. The bloody Freedom Rides of 1961 put
wheels on the sit-in. The tactic
helped bring about the public outcry
that led to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1963 which
guaranteed equal access to public accommodations in interstate commerce.
Today the Greensboro Woolworths
building has been transformed into
the International Civil Rights Center
and Museum.
All in all, not a bad legacy for
four college kids who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
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