 Norton U.S. History Tour: Lunch Counter Sit-ins 132 Elm Street, Greensboro, North Carolina
1960 On February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a black college, took seats at the lunch counter in a nearby Woolworth’s department store. The students had long discussed organizing some form of protest against segregation. Although African Americans were welcome to shop at Woolworth’s, the lunch counter was reserved for white patrons. Refused service, the four young men remained in their seats until the store closed. The following day they returned, accompanied by some twenty fellow students who joined the sit-in. By the end of the week hundreds of black students were participating in the protest. Woolworth’s saw its sales and profits drop as the sit-in continued but did not desegregate the lunch counter until July, some five months after the protests began. By that time, the sit-in movement had spread throughout the South and as far away as Nevada as thousands of activists, black and white, demanded an end to segregation in parks, restaurants, and stores. The demonstrators practiced nonviolence, but the crowds they attracted often did not. A sit-in in Nashville Tennessee turned violent as angry whites attacked the student activists, punching and kicking them. Despite such treatment and the threat of jail time, the sit-ins continued. Many historians regard these protests as the beginning of the mass movement for civil rights that marked the early 1960s. 1 Remembering the Sit-ins In these four audio recordings, participants in the lunch counter sit-ins that took place in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 recount their experiences before, during, and after that confrontation. Geneva Tinsdale worked at the store from 1951 to 1963. Franklin Eugene McCain and Jibreel Khazan (then Ezell Blair Jr.) were two of the four students who originally sat down at the counter, were refused service, and began the sit-in protest. The Woolworth’s counter did not reopen until February 23, 1960. An African American ate a meal at an integrated Woolworth’s lunch counter for the first time on July 25, 1960. During the same period, sit-ins at other segregated eating establishments were proliferating throughout the South. Audio Interview by Jim Schlosser, Greensboro News and Record. www.sitins.com
1 Blumberg, 64–69; Carrier, 84–85; Foner, 968.
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