Media/Headlines
Lunch Counter Gets Seat in History
Sunday, January 15, 1995
Greensboro's Woolworth's lunch counter - where civil rights history was made Feb. 1, 1960 - goes on display at the Smithsonian. Placed in the same Smithsonian corridor as the original, two-story-high Star Spangled Banner and a towering statue of George Washington as Roman emperor, it's a modest sight: a faded Formica lunch counter and four '50s-era stools.
But to the civil rights veterans who converged here Saturday for its unveiling, the events that took place at the Greensboro Woolworth's in 1960 were as big as they come.
This was the birthplace of a spontaneous national movement, when the baton was passed to a new generation that ultimately brought down segregation in the South.
"It was a good day for America," said Joseph McNeil, one of three original sit-in participants at Saturday's dedication. "Those stools represent symbols. We need symbols. Symbols last."
McNeil was just 17 and a freshman physics major at A&T when he, his roommate and two friends first defied the whites-only policy at Woolworth's and other downtown restaurants.
At Saturday's dedication - timed for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday - lions of the civil rights movement reminded listeners that it was not larger-than-life leaders who won the day, but the courage of such ordinary people as the A&T students, who inspired fellow students in the city, state and country to join in.
"Young people today might be tempted to say, 'I wish we had a leader like Martin Luther King.' But Martin Luther King was not the leader, he was the spokesperson," said Diane Nash, a founder of the pivotal Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that grew out of the sit-ins.
"It was students approximately 10 years younger than (King) who were frequently upset because they thought he was moving too slowly. It was students who did the work."
On a day that was part retrospective and part family reunion, the now gray-haired A&T graduates compared memories and snapshots of new grandchildren.
One of the four men who planned the initial sit-in at the Elm Street store - which is about to be turned into a Greensboro museum - has died: David Richmond, the tall, thin student nicknamed "Grasshopper."
McNeil, today a brigadier general in the Air Force reserves, has five children and works for the FAA.
Jibreel Khazan, a follower of Islam who changed his name from Ezell Blair Jr., jubilantly took the stage at the National Museum of American History and sang a spiritual for guest Marion Barry, mayor of D.C.
But it was the calm and imposing Franklin McCain who was the leader, then as now.
McCain emerged as the organizer in the first week of what was to be six months of protests before Woolworth's relented on its policy of respecting "local custom" on matters of race.
His wife Bettye, at the time a freshman at Bennett College, remembers the mix of fear and exhilaration when the girls in the student lounge listened to the urgent voice of a TV announcer:
"Four Negro students from A&T requested a seat at the lunch counter at Woolworth's store today ..."
In the next days, the students would be joined by A&T women, a number of white students from Woman's College of the University of North Carolina - now UNCG - and black women from the Bennett campus. The Bennett women broke their highly proper dress code and wore socks and tennis shoes - partly in anticipation of a long night in jail.
The students who took part were excused from class in order to rest, but Bettye McCain recalls that they went to class anyway, to help spread word about the sit-in.
Within a week, students were staging sit-ins in Winston-Salem, Durham, Charlotte and Raleigh. Eventually, the movement would spread throughout the South, as well as some cities in the North, where students picketed Woolworth's in a show of support.
The fact that every medium-size and even small town in the South seemed to have a Woolworth's made the store an obvious choice for the A&T students hoping to spark a wider movement.
But the question of why it began in Greensboro still stumps historians - and sometimes the participants themselves.
"It was a flash point that sometimes occurs once in a generation," said Bill Yeingst, a Smithsonian curator who helped design the exhibit.
"The thing that's unique about Greensboro was that the sit-ins were initiated and really sustained by students. In other places, these protests were usually very limited in their scope and the numbers of people who supported them."
Although the Montgomery bus boycott and the Little Rock school integration crisis preceded Greensboro, the lunch counter sit-ins showed the true potential and appeal of nonviolence, and became the model not only for a student-led civil rights struggle but later the anti-war protests and the women's liberation movement.
McNeil, the Air Force officer, downplayed the vision of the four freshmen - even when confronted by a Smithsonian exhibit dedicated to them.
Like Khazan and McCain, he points out that the Feb. 1 sit-in was one scene on a stage that had been set by others, people increasingly frustrated when Brown vs. Board of Education had resulted in little more than lip service by the late 1950s.
As inspiration, the students drew not only from King and Mahatma Gandhi, but from Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Ernie Green in Little Rock, and right at home in Greensboro, from NAACP leaders like George Simkins and Ezell Blair Sr., educators like Nell Coley and Vance Chavis.
"When you're a student, you don't have to worry about feeding a family," said McNeil, 52. "We are where we are because we stepped on the shoulders of our parents.
"There must have thousands of cases where people took on the system of segregation and it didn't get the press. Why was ours the one that garnered national attention? I don't know, but I thank God it happened."
Within a year of the Greensboro sit-in, an estimated 70,000 people around the country had taken part in student-led sit-ins, making the Greensboro sit-in seem as small and insignificant as the 8-foot section of luncheonette counter now sitting in the Smithsonian.
On Saturday, ringed by TV lights and curious tourists who had happened upon a 35-year-old news story, the three survivors of Feb. 1 stepped lightly in the halls of history.
He'd finally gotten a taste of that 29-cent Woolworth's strawberry shortcake, McCain quipped, and couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.
There would be 70,000 students after them, true enough. But there were only four "first-dayers," as they came to be known.
Leaving their dorm rooms in Scott Hall with a plan that day, did they wonder where it would lead?
"I didn't think about whether I was ever coming back. That really didn't matter," McCain said. "Because life the way it was, wasn't worth living."