Fifty years ago Monday, four college freshmen walked into an F.W. Woolworth in Greensboro, N.C., and quietly and peacefully took seats at the lunch counter. In so doing, they changed American society.
Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond were not the first blacks to stage a sit-in at a “white’s only” lunch counter in the South, but their quiet protest proved to be the most successful and raised the nation’s awareness of the inequities that then existed throughout the South.
“The best feeling of my life,” McCain said, was “sitting on that dumb stool. I felt so relieved ... I felt so at peace and so self-accepted at that very moment. Nothing has ever happened to me since then that topped that good feeling of being clean and fully accepted and feeling proud of me.”
From four, the number of protesters mushroomed daily, reaching at least 1,000 by the fifth day. Within two months, sit-ins were occurring in 54 cities in nine states. Within six months, the Greensboro Woolworth lunch counter was desegregated.
The sit-in was no spur-of-the moment decision by the four students at North Carolina A&T;, then the state’s “black” college. The four students — all 17 and 18 at the time — were part of an NAACP youth group started by Ella Baker, known as the mother of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. They spent much of the fall semester discussing how to make real the unfulfilled promise of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. They purchased small items in the store before sitting down at the lunch counter to show that the counter’s “white’s only” policy did not include the rest of the store.
Sit-in demonstrations between 1960 and 1965 helped pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“Greensboro was the pivot that turned the history of America around,” says Bill Chafe, Duke University historian and author of “Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.”
McCain went on to become a research chemist and sales executive, while McNeil retired as a two-star major general from the Air Force Reserves in 2001 and also worked as an investment banker. Richmond died in 1990.
McCain says he had tried to follow the advice of his parents and grandparents: Believe in the Constitution; get a good education; respect your elders and do good deeds. But he still had no dignity, no respect and few rights, all of which filled him with hate, “not for people but for a system that I thought had betrayed me.”
“We were quite serious, and the issue that we rallied behind was a very serious issue because it represented years of suffering and disrespect and humiliation,” McNeil said. “... Segregation was an evil kind of thing that needed attention.”
Thanks in part to the efforts of four young men 50 years ago, segregation sanctioned by the government and tolerated throughout the South no longer exists in the land of the free. For that, we’re a much better nation.
