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February Is a Month That’s Rich in Black History

The four Black men who sparked a civil rights movement by integrating a Greensboro, NC lunch counter. Credit: New York World Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, Library of Congress

February is Black History Month, an appropriate time for celebrating the struggles, triumphs and contributions of this nation’s African American citizens. Born in February were President Abraham Lincoln, 19th century civil rights crusader Frederick Douglass, “Mother of the Movement” Rosa Parks and John Lewis, a youthful disciple of Martin Luther King Jr. who went on to be elected a U.S. congressman called “the conscience of Capitol Hill” before his death in 2020. 

The shortest month, February, is filled with Black history. The month started with the 65th anniversary of the lunch counter sit-in protests in the South that began on Feb. 1, 1960. It was a normal Monday in the sleepy Southern town of Greensboro, NC, when history changed forever at a prosaic Woolworth’s “five and dime” store. Racial segregation was endemic in Greensboro—until into the store and up to the lunch counter walked four young Black men, students at nearby North Carolina A&T.

Ezell Blair, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain and David Richmond sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and nonviolently defied local laws and customs mandating racial segregation in Southern restaurants and preventing African Americans from simply sitting down for a meal in white-owned eateries. “I had had enough, and I made up my mind that I had to do something,” McNeil said. 

Plans for the protest were hatched during a late night dorm room talk session. “We have got to make some plans. What are we going to do? Time to act,” said Blair. 

In 1960, many Blacks on campus and in town were wary of protests and fearful of upsetting the Southern status quo of white supremacy. “We were seen as different… kind of cuckoo, kind of crazy,” said McCain. One person in Greensboro who did not see the four protesters as crazy was Ralph Johns, a white local businessman who aided the sit-ins with encouragement and publicity for the cause. 

Just four Black men started a movement in Greensboro with a small protest in a small city, but soon their movement spread across the South and entered the consciousness of this country through newspaper reports and television coverage of white mobs assaulting nonviolent protesters at lunch counters and white police dragging the protesters off to jail. 

Not all whites behaved so shabbily, even in the segregated South. Soon young white people would join the sit-ins and other civil rights protests that sprouted across the region. Blacks and whites struggled together to end racial segregation in restaurants, hotels, libraries, schools and swimming pools in the South because of a movement that started in North Carolina on Feb. 1, 1960. Young Black activist John Lewis joined sit-ins in Nashville, and his mentor, Dr. King, was arrested during a sit-in in Atlanta to protest segregation at the Magnolia Room cafe in the Rich’s department store, a symbol of the city’s commercial and civic life.

The sit-ins that began in Greensboro 65 years ago are well remembered today, but the same tactic had been used years before. As early as 1943, Washington, DC was the site of a sit-in to protest segregation in the nation’s capital. In 1958, sit-ins were held at restaurants in Oklahoma City and Wichita, KS. Those early sit-ins were courageous but fleeting events. By contrast, the sit-ins that began on Feb. 1, 1960 quickly grew into similar protests in many states. By the summer of 1960, thousands of people had joined sit-ins.

As the 1960s rolled on, the sit-in movement provided impetus and inspiration for other crusades. In 1961 the Freedom Riders boarded interstate buses on journeys through the South that shone a spotlight on Southern segregation when Freedom Riders were assaulted and one of their buses was torched by a white supremacist mob in Alabama. 

On their way to Alabama, the Freedom Riders stopped here in Athens and were served without incident in 1961, the same year violence broke out as Black students Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter enrolled at the University of Georgia. In 1963, marches against Jim Crow segregation began at popular restaurant The Varsity’s downtown Athens and Milledge Avenue locations.

Sixty-five years ago, history happened in Greensboro, NC. Shortly before his death John Lewis was right when he wrote, “The call of history is sounding again.”

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