Greensboro+Sit-In+Campaign

On February 1, 1960, four African-American students of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at a white-only lunch counter inside a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store. While sit-ins had been held elsewhere in the United States, the Greensboro sit-in catalyzed a wave of nonviolent protest against private-sector segregation in the United States. These sit-ins were not spur the moment, they were planned and executed just they way the students wanted. The four students who staged the protest were male freshmen, and they had read about nonviolent protest. One of them, Ezell Blair, had seen a documentary on the life of Mohandas Gandhi. Another of the four, Joseph McNeil, worked part-time in the university library with an alumna of the school, Eula Hudgens, who had participated in freedom ride. The protests continued through Monday, February 1, 1960 all the way through the following week. On Saturday, fourteen hundred students arrived at the Greensboro Woolworth’s store. Those who could not sit at the lunch counter formed picket lines outside the store. A phoned-in bomb threat cut the protest short, but the following week sit-ins began at Woolworth’s stores in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Durham. Soon other department stores with segregated lunch counters became targets of these protests. Protesters were left alone by the police department while those who became violent were prosecuted. No statewide protesters were arrested until forty-one black students in a picket line at the Cameron Village Woolworth’s in Raleigh were charged with trespassing. Despite these arrests, progress was swift. At many stores, African-Americans were soon eating at the same lunch counters as whites. At the Greensboro S.H. Kress store, blacks and whites were eating together at the lunch counter by the end of February 1960. Some stores in Raleigh closed their lunch counters altogether to preclude protests. Though most stores did not immediately desegregate their lunch counters, the sit-ins were successful both in forcing partial integration and in increasing national awareness of the indignities suffered by African-Americans in the southern United States.

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