On February 1, 1960, four Black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University — Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil — walked into the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, bought some school supplies, sat down at the whites-only lunch counter, and ordered coffee. [1]
They were not served. They sat there until the store closed.
The next day they came back with twenty-three students. The day after that, sixty-six. By the fourth day, over three hundred students occupied the lunch counter, including white students from the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. [1]
Within two weeks, sit-ins had spread to fifteen cities in five Southern states. Within two months, the movement had reached every Southern state. By the end of 1960, an estimated 70,000 people had participated in sit-ins, and more than 3,000 had been arrested. [1]
They were beaten. They had coffee poured on their heads, cigarettes extinguished on their skin, ketchup smeared in their hair. They did not fight back. They sat. [1]
The students drew from the teachings of Gandhian nonviolence and the Nashville workshops led by James Lawson, a divinity student who had studied satyagraha in India. Lawson taught them to go limp when dragged, to protect their heads but never strike back, to look their attackers in the eye. [2]
On July 25, 1960 — less than six months after four freshmen sat down — the Greensboro Woolworth’s desegregated its lunch counter. The sit-in movement directly led to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became one of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement. [1]
Four teenagers with the courage to sit still.
Bibliography
[1] Wikipedia. “Greensboro sit-ins.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins [2] Wikipedia. “Nashville sit-ins.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_sit-ins