Greensboro Sit-ins (1960): Four Students at a Woolworth's Counter

The Greensboro sit-ins began on 1 February 1960, when four Black college students sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave when denied service. Their protest spread within weeks to dozens of cities across the American South. It turned the sit-in into a mass tactic of the civil rights movement and led directly to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Background: segregation at the lunch counter

In 1960 racial segregation was still the law across the South. Black customers could shop in chain stores such as Woolworth’s, but were barred from sitting at the lunch counters inside, a daily humiliation that young people felt keenly. The Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and the success of the Montgomery bus boycott had raised hopes, but change in most Southern towns had been slow.

Greensboro saw itself as a progressive city, yet its schools and public places remained segregated. At North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A&T), a historically Black institution, four first-year students, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, had talked for weeks about taking action. They had been influenced by the non-violent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and by the murder of Emmett Till, which had happened when they were young teenagers.

The first day

On the afternoon of Monday 1 February 1960 the four walked into the Woolworth’s on South Elm Street. They bought school supplies and toiletries, keeping their receipts, then sat down at the lunch counter and asked for coffee. A waitress refused, saying the counter served only white customers. The store manager, Clarence “Curly” Harris, hoped they would grow tired and leave.

They did not. Dressed neatly and sitting quietly, they stayed until the store closed, while a police officer paced behind them without making an arrest because they had broken no law. As they left, they promised to come back the next day.

The movement grows

On 2 February more than 20 students returned. By the fourth day hundreds of people were taking part, including students from Bennett College, a Black women’s college, and a few white students from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina. Protesters also targeted the nearby Kress store. White youths heckled and harassed them, but the students kept to their discipline of non-violence.

News coverage carried the idea across the region. Within a week sit-ins had begun in Winston-Salem, Durham and Charlotte, and by the end of February they had reached cities in several Southern states. In Nashville, Tennessee, students trained in non-violence by James Lawson, among them Diane Nash and John Lewis, began a disciplined campaign on 13 February. Estimates suggest that by the spring tens of thousands of people had taken part and that sit-ins had touched more than 50 cities, though exact figures vary.

The protests carried real risks. Participants were taunted, spat on, had food poured over them and were sometimes beaten, and thousands were arrested over the course of the year.

Support came from outside the South too. In northern cities, CORE and student groups organised picket lines outside Woolworth’s and other chain stores whose southern branches refused to serve Black customers. The national companies insisted that they simply followed local custom, but the picketing added to the financial and public pressure on them.

Victory in Greensboro

In Greensboro the store briefly closed its counter and city leaders tried to negotiate. The students and Black residents answered with a boycott of the downtown stores, and Woolworth’s lost a large share of its business. On 25 July 1960 the Greensboro store served Black customers at its counter for the first time. The first to be served were a small group of Black employees from the store’s own kitchen, among them Geneva Tisdale.

Other cities followed. Nashville’s lunch counters began to desegregate in May 1960, and over the next year many stores across the upper South opened their counters. In the Deep South resistance lasted longer, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations nationwide.

The Greensboro Four

The four students came from modest backgrounds and had grown up under segregation in North Carolina. Joseph McNeil, from Wilmington, had been angered on returning to the South from a trip to New York, where he could eat anywhere. They were encouraged by Ralph Johns, a white clothing merchant in Greensboro who supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The four later recalled that they had expected to be arrested, or even harmed, when they sat down.

Their later lives took different paths. Ezell Blair Jr. moved to Massachusetts and changed his name to Jibreel Khazan. Franklin McCain became a chemist and remained active in civic life in North Carolina until his death in 2014. Joseph McNeil joined the US Air Force and rose to the rank of major general in the Air Force Reserve. David Richmond stayed in Greensboro and died in 1990.

The founding of SNCC

The sit-ins created a new generation of activists. Ella Baker, a veteran organiser then running the Atlanta office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, saw the need to connect them and invited student leaders to a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, held on 15–17 April 1960. Rather than becoming a youth wing of an existing organisation, the students formed their own, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

SNCC went on to play a central role in the Freedom Rides, voter registration drives in Mississippi and the marches of the mid-1960s, with leaders such as John Lewis and Diane Nash.

Legacy

The Greensboro Four became symbols of youthful courage. A section of the original counter was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1993 and is displayed at the National Museum of American History. The Woolworth’s building itself became the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which opened on 1 February 2010, the 50th anniversary of the first sit-in. A statue of the four stands on the campus of what is now North Carolina A&T State University.

Greensboro was not the first sit-in. CORE activists had used the tactic in Chicago in the 1940s, and in 1958 young NAACP members held sit-ins at drugstores in Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma City. What made Greensboro different was the speed and scale with which it spread, turning a local protest into a regional movement led by students.

Timeline

• 1960, 1 February: Four A&T students sit at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter.
• 1960, 4 February: Hundreds of students, including women from Bennett College, join the protest.
• 1960, 13 February: Nashville students begin their sit-in campaign.
• 1960, 15–17 April: SNCC is founded at Shaw University in Raleigh.
• 1960, May: Nashville lunch counters begin to desegregate.
• 1960, 25 July: The Greensboro Woolworth’s serves Black customers at its counter.
• 1993: A section of the counter goes to the Smithsonian Institution.
• 2010, 1 February: The International Civil Rights Center and Museum opens in the old store.

Why it matters

Four students with no organisation behind them showed that ordinary young people could challenge segregation directly and peacefully. Their sit-in sparked a regional movement, created SNCC and shifted the energy of the civil rights struggle towards student-led direct action.