The Greensboro Four
Four A&T College students, from left:
Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain,
Billy Smith and Clarence Henderson,
sit down at the all-white lunch
counter of F.W. Woolworth Co
Feb. 2, 1960 in Greensboro, N.C.
| On Feb. 1, 1960, four A &T University students, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Billy Smith and Clarence Henderson sat down at the whites-only lunch counter at the Woolworth Store on South Elm Street. Had they been ordinary students on an ordinary mission, this event would have gone unnoticed in the annals of history. But these four scholarship recipients were just the opposite of this. They were four black students who dared to sit in a place where an unwritten code of law known as Jim Crow forbid them. |
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The young college students acted at a time when protests against segregation in schools and on buses were taking place in the South, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But there were few challenges to segregation in privately owned businesses, such as Woolworth. The rationale was that a man's business was a part of his home and thus private property. Thus he had the right of association and could bar anyone from entering. In the days after Feb. 1, the "Greensboro Four," as they were later called, would be joined by other students at the Woolworth counter and at the Kress 5 & 10 lunch counter a half-block away. Their protests inspired black people to do the same at Formica-topped dime-store counters in other cities. The movement they started led to the integration of the Woolworth and the Kress chains, landmarks on every main street in the South.
(Photo and Information courtesy of The Greensboro Sit-Ins by James Schlosser) |
