{"id":62037,"date":"2025-02-01T11:12:57","date_gmt":"2025-02-01T11:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/discover-how-four-black-college-students-sparked-a-nationwide-civil-rights-movement-on-this-date-in-1960\/"},"modified":"2025-02-01T11:12:57","modified_gmt":"2025-02-01T11:12:57","slug":"discover-how-four-black-college-students-sparked-a-nationwide-civil-rights-movement-on-this-date-in-1960","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=62037","title":{"rendered":"Discover How Four Black College Students Sparked a Nationwide Civil Rights Movement, on This Date in 1960"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A statue of the four freshmen who led the sit-in at the lunch counter of a Woolworth\u2019s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina.\u00a0
\n Ted Richardson\/For The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/span>
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On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, four college freshmen walked up to the lunch counter of a Woolworth\u2019s<\/a> department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and changed the course of history.<\/p>\n

Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond were students at Agricultural & Technical College of North Carolina. All four were Black, and the lunch counters at Woolworth stores were reserved for \u201cwhites only.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wanting to draw attention to racial segregation and discrimination in the U.S. South, the students walked up to the L-shaped lunch counter<\/a> and took a seat. Each then asked for a cup of coffee. They were all refused service. Staff called the police, but since McNeil, McCain, Blair and Richmond hadn\u2019t done anything wrong and were paying customers (having purchased goods at the store\u2019s non-segregated counter earlier that day), police officers decided not to take any action. In the meantime, local Greensboro merchant Ralph Johns,<\/a> a white ally of the students who encouraged sit-ins as a form of protest, had already alerted the media. The four men stayed at the lunch counter until the store closed for the night.<\/p>\n

The following day, the number of sit-in participants at Greensboro\u2019s Woolworth lunch counter more than tripled, including female students from nearby Bennett College<\/a>. By the fourth day, more than 300 people partook in the nonviolent protest. The numbers grew so large that the protest even spread to the lunch counter at S.H. Kress & Company<\/a>, another Greensboro department store.<\/p>\n

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Reflections on the Greensboro Lunch Counter<\/p>\n

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