Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 70

On February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond, all students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College (now University), entered FW. Woolworth’s, purchased goods, and proceeded to the whites-only lunch counter and requested service. Denied service, the four students remained seated until the store closed. Sit-ins had taken place in the 1940s, and in 1958 and 1959 in Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas, and in St. Louis, Missouri, respectively. These protests demonstrated that the Civil Rights Movement was not just a southern phenomenon, but also a national one in its earliest days. The mass mobilization of student protesters emboldened by the action of the Greensboro Four, as they were called, was a new weapon in the African American struggle for freedom. The Greensboro students’ attack against segregated public spaces in the South by direct non-violent resistance changed the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. The simple request for a cup of coffee set off a chain of events that ultimately dismantled the remaining vestiges of de jure and de facto racial segregation.

The Greensboro Four returned to the Woolworth store on February 2, 1990, to commemorate their famous protest. Shown are (from left) Joseph McNeil, Jibreal Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair, Jr.), Franklin McCain, and David Richmond (AP Photo/Chuck Burton).

The quartet returned each morning with other student protesters and occupied lunch counter seats. Within a week, sit-ins took place in Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, and Raleigh, North Carolina. On February 10, 1960, Hampton, Virginia, became the first city outside of North Carolina to experience a sit-in, and by the end of the month sit-ins had occurred in more than 30 communities in 7 states. By the end of April, sit-ins had reached every southern state and attracted a total of as many as 50,000 students. The sit-ins that began in Greensboro and spread to other cities across the South gave birth in April 1960 to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Although the students at North Carolina A&T captured national attention, it was their counterparts in Nashville, Tennessee, who took over the leadership of the rapidly spreading student movement. Nashville students entered the movement 12 days after the Greensboro students. It did not hurt that in Nashville, The Tennessean covered the protest in detail: seventy stories within the next 14 weeks. While Greensboro began student demonstrations before Nashville, the Athens of the South began desegregating its lunch counters on May 13, 1960. Greensboro followed two months later and desegregated on July 25, 1960.

Linda T. Wynn