Sitting Down to Take a Stand: Sixty years ago, four black students asked to be served at an all-white lunch counter in the South and dramatically changed the civil rights movement.

• Author: Roberts, Sam

1619

This article is part of Upfront's ongoing series about the African American experience, inspired by The New York Times' 1619 Project.

Just after 4 p.m. on February 1,1960, four black college students, dressed in their Sunday best, walked into the F. W. Woolworth department store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. After buying some school supplies and other items, they sat down at the all-white lunch counter and tried to order a cup of coffee.

"We don't serve Negroes here," a waitress behind the counter said.

"We are going to sit here until we are served," one of the students, Jibreel Khazan*, replied.

Khazan and his classmates--Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond--never did get served that day. But the four freshmen from North Carolina A&T State, a historically black university in Greensboro, remained seated. That simple act of defiance 60 years ago would change history, inspiring a massive movement of sit-ins and other protests against segregation in scores of cities throughout the South. From that moment forward, those students would forever be known as "The Greensboro Four."

"The spontaneous courage of those four young men, who simply decided the night before, 'let's do something,' triggered a whole movement of sit-ins around the South, and supporting demonstrations in other places," says Frye Gaillard, a historian who has written several books about the American South. "I would argue that it jump-started the civil rights movement."

The Jim Crow South

Six years before the Greensboro sit-ins, the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, overturning the "separate but equal" principle that had been established by the Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. In addition, the bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, in the mid-1950s, led by Martin Luther King Jr., prompted a Supreme Court decision barring segregation on public buses (see timeline, p. 20).

But by the end of the 1950s, most public facilities in the South were still segregated--and rarely equal. State and local legislation known as Jim Crow laws remained on the books, and "Whites Only" signs were plastered above lunch counters, water fountains, waiting rooms, and bathrooms, and in restaurants and hotels across the region.

Though a few sit-ins had been staged in other Southern cities, they mostly remained isolated events that failed to capture the attention of the entire nation. And the fledgling civil rights movement seemed to be moving slowly, as leaders of the N.A.A.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) argued that the best way to challenge segregation was in the courts--a process that took years.

In the fall of 1959, the four college freshmen at A&T began to grow impatient with the slow pace of progress. They met often in their dorm rooms, talking about racial injustice, King's philosophy of nonviolence, and what they could do to make a difference. Their discussions took on more urgency after Christmas break that year, when McNeil was refused service at a rest stop in Richmond, Virginia, while traveling back to school from his family's home in New York City. The next time the four best friends met in their dorm, they began to devise a plan to turn their late-night talks into action. "Adults have been complacent and fearful," Khazan later recalled saying. "It is time for someone to wake up and change the situation."

"And we decided to start here," he explained.

The Greensboro Four

"Here" was the Woolworth's, part of one of the world's largest retail chains. It was a typical "five and dime" that sold all kinds of merchandise for less than a dollar, and its lunch counter served about 2,000 meals a day. When it came to serving black people at the lunch counter, the policy of the R W. Woolworth Company, based in New York City, was to "abide by local custom." In the North, African Americans sat alongside white people at Woolworth's, but not in the South.

On February 1, the four young men made purchases at other sales counters in the Greensboro store to prove that they'd been served and their money accepted. Then they quietly sat down at the...