50 years ago, sit-ins changed society

We are fortunate that half a century ago, in Greensboro, N.C., four black freshmen from North Carolina A & T University made history.

They did so by sitting down on Feb. 1, 1960, at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and asking to be served. The students — Ezell Blair Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil — were not served that day because they were black. Woolworth’s was abiding by the local custom of only serving whites.

But life changed that day for all of us in the United States when those four young black men sat down.

At the time of their unselfish acts of courage, racial segregation was the norm all across the country. Blacks were second-class citizens who had to endure hatred and the daily indignity of unequal treatment.

By 1960, impatience with the pace of change in race relations was rising.

Six years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional and five years after Rosa Parks protested “back of the bus” treatment, America’s racist caste system was entrenched.

The movement needed a spark.

Greensboro provided it, igniting mass protest against the entire system of Jim Crow segregation.

The four students sat at the lunch counter for two and a half hours that first day.

Word spread throughout the campus of what they had done at the lunch counter and what had happened. By the following day, more than 20 students appeared at the lunch counter ready to sit in and protest. Soon, crowds of students were protesting at the stores regularly.

By Feb. 10, sit-ins had begun all across the state of North Carolina, in Fayetteville, Durham, Raleigh and Charlotte. Other cities across the country, mainly in the South, experienced similar acts of protest that signaled that America’s racial apartheid system was finally going to be challenged head on but nonviolently.

Resistance to change was fierce. Students were hit with eggs, burned with cigarettes and threatened with violence.

On April 20, 1960, in Greensboro, 45 college students were arrested for protesting. Among that group were two female white students.

Success did not take long.

By August 1960, six months after the initial Greensboro sit-in, lunch counters throughout the South announced that they were now integrated.

This success built momentum for the great civil rights laws that were to come in the following five years.

The late historian Howard Zinn wrote the following regarding the importance of the sit-in movement to the overall civil rights struggle. “The sit-ins marked a turning point,” he wrote. Black Americans were “rebelling now … with skill in organization, sophistication in tactics and an unassailable moral position.”

Fifty years later, we are still in their debt.

Brian Gilmore, a poet and lawyer, lives in Takoma Park, Md. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.