50 years after the Greensboro Sit-ins
A section of lunch counter from the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s is now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History.
The Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action in the African-American Civil Rights Movement, leading to increased national sentiment at a crucial period in American history. When four black college students sat in protest at Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the time, it was unforeseen what impact their actions would have on the rest of the South. As the sit-in garnered national attention, the sit-in movement spread to other southern cities and led to the desegregation of numerous lunch counters. Following are two stories that describe what life was like in the south for African Americans during the 1960s and why a group of black college students decided that life, as they knew it, needed to drastically change and what that decision led to and how it impacted a nation 50 years later.
With their very bodies they obstructed the wheels of injustice
Sit-ins were very significant to the [civil rights] movement. They symbolized a change in the mood of African-American people. According to Dr. James Farmer, “up until then, we had accepted segregation — begrudgingly — but we had accepted it. We had spoken against it, we had made speeches, but no one had defied segregation.” At long last after decades of acceptance, four freshman students at North Carolina A&T went into Woolworth and at the lunch counter they “sat-in.” When told they would not be served, they refused to leave and this sparked a movement throughout the South. Black students in colleges throughout the South saw it on television they said “Hey man, look at what our brothers and sisters in Greensboro are doing. What’s wrong with us? Why don’t we go out and do the same thing?” And they went out, so it swept across the South like the proverbial wildfire, with students rejecting segregation. With their very bodies they obstructed the wheels of injustice. Read more…
The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement
On Feb. 1, 1960, four students from all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College walked into a Woolworth five-and-dime with the intention of ordering lunch. But the manager of the Greensboro Woolworth had intentions of his own — to maintain the lunch counter’s strict whites-only policy. Franklin McCain was one of the four young men who shoved history forward by refusing to budge. McCain remembers the anxiety he felt when he went to the store that Monday afternoon, the plan he and his friends had devised to launch their protest and how he felt when he sat down on that stool. “Fifteen seconds after … I had the most wonderful feeling. I had a feeling of liberation, restored manhood. I had a natural high. And I truly felt almost invincible. Mind you, [I was] just sitting on a dumb stool and not having asked for service yet,” McCain says. “It’s a feeling that I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to have again. It’s the kind of thing that people pray for … and wish for all their lives and never experience it. And I felt as though I wouldn’t have been cheated out of life had that been the end of my life at that second or that moment.” Read more…
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