Today marks the 50th anniversary of the day when four black college students protested Jim Crow in Greensboro, N.C., by sitting at a lunch counter in Woolworth's and demanding to be served. While blacks could purchase household goods and other items from the department store in 1960, they could not sit at its then segregated lunch counters in the South.
The actions of the four students from North Carolina A&T State University --Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr.--led to a boycott of downtown Greensboro stores that lasted for months. By just the second day of protest, the young men had recruited 25 fellow students. By the fourth day of protest, more than 300 students, including whites, were taking part, according to CNN. Before long, the lunch counter protests spread to nine other states, leading to desegregation of lunch counters throughout the South.
Protesting students were sometimes roughed up, threatened by white supremacists, dusted with itching powder and pelted with eggs, but they continued to rally nonetheless. Their movement made national headlines, and, in a surprising move, President Dwight Eisenhower expressed his support of them.
He was quoted as saying then, "Now let me make one thing clear. I am deeply sympathetic with the efforts of any group to enjoy the rights of equality that they are guaranteed by the Constitution."
Knowing that Eisenhower supported the students certainly makes me appreciate him more. And today, the four students who launched the lunch counter protest will be recognized by the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, which celebrates its grand opening at the site of the former Woolworth's store. The museum's main attraction will be an exhibit featuring the original stools and counter where the four students sat and demanded service.
While celebrated for their actions today, some classmates dismissed the four young men when they began protesting.
"We had talked to several students about this fractured and unequal democracy and what we wanted to do about it and, quite honestly, most people thought we were crazy," Franklin McCain remembered.
But ultimately he charged on because he believed that one need "Never request permission to start a revolution."
Because they dared to act, the four men helped strike down the pervasive and racist "separate but (un)equal" way of life in America.
Comments
I was a young girl living in Greensboro at the time of the sit-ins. I remember being scared for these young men. They were very brave to do what they did in those times.
I just wish that we could all move beyond using something as irrelevant as skin color to make value-based decisions. Pray we move past old bigotries. We are all in this together.
I was born in Scott County, MS in 1950 but my parents moved my sister and me to California in 1956. However, my sister and I spent almost every summer with our grandparents and other members of our large family. I was 14 years old in the summer of 1964 and I remember sitting with my aunt and my sister in a small white-owned cafe in Philadelphia, MS the evening that the bodies of the 3 freedom riders were found in a quarry in that city. I don’t think I had ever seen my aunt look so frightened as when a white man approached our table inquiring as to “where did I get the waist-length, straight hair” that was in a braid hanging down my back. (My father was a Choctaw Indian and my mother is African-American.) So, you see, all of the progress we have made over the last 50 or so years still remains so very fragile.