February 1 marks the anniversary of the day in 1960 when four black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College entered a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina and sat at the counter to order a cup of coffee.
Staff refused them service, noting it was a “Whites Only” counter, and the store manager asked them to leave.
Instead, the four men – Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr. – stayed at the counter until the store closed.
The next morning, the Greensboro Four were joined by 20 more students from North Carolina A & T College who were again refused service, and who again stayed all day.
On February 3, over 60 people came to the Woolworth’s, and by the fifth day the number had reached over 300.
Faced with a public relations nightmare, Woolworth’s said it would "discuss" changes to the store's segregation policies, but no substantive revisions were made. Instead, the city passed new and more stringent segregation laws that allowed the police to arrest the protesters as trespassers.
Within a week, however, similar lunch counter protests were going on all over the south.
Facing an over 33% drop in sales, Woolworth’s dropped it’s segregation policies and, six months after the first sit-in, the Greensboro Four returned to the same Woolworth lunch counter to be served.
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