Woolworth’s officials agreed that a piece of the counter belonged at the Smithsonian, and volunteers from the local carpenters’ union removed an eight-foot section with four stools. The lunch counter sit-ins--direct action protests against a hated symbol of Jim Crow segregation--took the civil rights movement to a new stage. “I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and even in high school, we thought about doing something like that,” he recalls. A section of that historic counter is now held by the National Museum of American History, where the chairman of the division of politics and reform, Harry Rubenstein, calls it “a significant part of a larger collection about participation in our political system.” The story behind it is central to the epic struggle of the civil rights movement.William Yeingst, chairman of the museum’s division of home and community life, says the Greensboro protest “inspired similar actions in the state and elsewhere in the South. At a Raleigh Woolworth's, 41 students were arrested for trespassing, but most students who took part in the lunch counter sit-ins were not arrested for protesting racial segregation. Joseph McNeil (from left), Franklin McCain and David Richmond look at the four stools that they made famous with their historic protest at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on Feb. 1, 1960. The day after that, students from another college took part, and before long, young people began holding sit-ins at lunch counters elsewhere. Predictably, the students were denied service and ordered to leave.
By While sit-ins had been held elsewhere in the United States, the Greensboro sit-in catalyzed a wave of nonviolent protest against private-sector segregation in the United States. Protesters ready to assume their place crowded the aisles. The lunch counter, where diners faced rose-tinted mirrors, generated significant profits. The sit-ins also stand out because they were a grassroots movement organized by a group of students unaffiliated with any particular civil rights organization.
Over the next few months, blacks and whites were sharing lunch counters in Greensboro and other cities in the South and North alike. The four students would first stop at Ralph Johns’ store so that Johns could contact a newspaper reporter. “The sit-in at the Greensboro Woolworth’s was one of the early and pivotal events that inaugurated the student-led phase of the civil rights movement,” Yeingst says.More than three decades later, in October 1993, Yeingst learned Woolworth’s was closing the Greensboro store as part of a company-wide downsizing.
When they finished shopping, they sat down at the lunch counter and asked to be served.
Throngs of activists were heading to lunch counters and demanding service. Courage at the Greensboro Lunch Counter On February 1, four college students sat down to request lunch service at a North Carolina Woolworth’s and ignited a struggle Indeed, they launched a protest that lasted six months and helped change America.
During the first week of February 1960, a small sit-in demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina , grew into a significant protest with over eighty students participating by the third day. This prompted groups of white men to show up at the lunch counters and assault, insult, or otherwise disturb the protesters. SNCC would go on to play roles in the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The 1960 Greensboro Sit-In at Woolworth's Lunch Counter