The Greensboro Four: A Story of the Sit-In Movement

People complain that the problems of our society are too overwhelming for one person to do anything about. One person may not be able to change the world but one act by a few good people can affect a wave of change throughout a state and a country. This was the result of a plea for justice set in motion on February 1, 1960, when four African-American students from North Carolina A&T State University sat down at a "whites only" lunch counter in Woolworth's.

I've been to that Woolworth's and ordered something from that lunch counter. I was a freshman at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1988-twenty-eight years after someone who looked like me sat down at that lunch counter for the first time. When I walked into that store, I had no idea of the events that had allowed me to buy a piece of apple pie that fall day, but I soon learned. What follows is an account of how my city, became the center of a new civil rights movement.

The four young men, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond lived on the same floor of the dorm at North Carolina A&T State University. Two of the friends were born and raised in Greensboro. One was from Wilmington but transplanted to New York and the other was born and raised in Washington, D.C. On the night of January 31, 1960, they decided that something needed to be done about the problem of segregation that still existed in the South.

Each of the young men had been affected by the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. For those of you who don't know about Emmett Till, his plight garnered media attention at his open casket funeral held in Chicago, Illinois, at the request of his mother, Mamie. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year old boy who was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman in a store in Money, Mississippi. He was dragged from his uncle's home in the middle of the night, beaten, shot in the head, and thrown in the river with a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan around his neck. The men responsible were acquitted of his murder.