SPOTLIGHT ON AMERICAN ANNIVERSARIES
FEB 1, 1960 ● 50 YEARS
On this date, four African-American college students took seats at a “whites-only” Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, to protest the South’s Jim Crow laws in general and the city’s segregated eating establishments in particular. The event was a flashpoint of the civil rights movement, igniting a wave of sit-ins and student activism across the South that captured the attention of the media, elicited the acknowledgment of the president and effectively shifted public sentiment regarding African-American civil rights in the US.
The sit-in was not spontaneous, rather it was a choreographed act of nonviolent protest. On the afternoon of Monday, Feb 1, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr., Franklin McCain and David Richmond—freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College (an esteemed African -American institution)—occupied stools at the lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworth in downtown Greensboro and ordered coffee. The white waitresses dispatched an African-American employee to apprise them, “We don’t serve colored folks here,” and ask them to leave. The men refused to go until they were served. The store manager instructed the staff to do nothing and just let them sit. The students had prepared a series of statements and responses for any imaginable confrontation, but they were caught off guard by the inattention of both store management and the police. The store was closed early, the students were not served and they eventually exited the store through a side door without incident. A photographer snapped a photograph of “The Greensboro Four” on the sidewalk, but the Greensboro Record did not publish it for fear of appearing to support the cause of integration.
Regardless, word of the action quickly circulated around campus, and on Tuesday morning 27 A&T co-eds joined the original four at the Woolworth lunch counter and again were denied service, but this time it made the local news. By the end of the week, the daily sit-ins were drawing thousands of black and white college and high school students to Woolworth and the S.H. Kress five-and-dime down the street. The following week, the cause was taken up at college towns across North Carolina, and by the end of February, the sit-in movement had spread to 30 cities in eight states and made national headlines.
During a Mar 16 news conference, President Eisenhower gave credence to the movement in his response to an ABC reporter’s question about the sit-ins, saying, “Let me make one thing clear. I am deeply sympathetic with the efforts of any group to enjoy the rights, the rights of equality that they are guaranteed by the Constitution. I do not believe that violence in any form furthers that aspiration, and I deplore any violence that is exercised to prevent them-in having and enjoying those rights.”
In April, after more than 50 such protests across the South, the movement became nationally organized with the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). With funding from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC coordinated more student protests through 1961, including swim-ins at segregated public pools, read-ins at segregated public libraries, wade-ins at segregated public beaches and even kneel-ins at segregated churches.
The Greensboro Woolworth (and the Kress) bowed to pressure and officially integrated the lunch counter on July 25, 1960; the first African Americans to be served were four Woolworth employees. Four years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, requiring desegregation of all public facilities.
Woolworth closed its Greensboro store in 1993. Because the building was not at least 50 years old, it did not qualify for National Historic Landmark status. The site is currently being preserved as the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. An eight-foot section of the original lunch counter was dedicated at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on Jan 14, 1995.
www.chases.com ● Chase’s Calendar of Events 2010