The grand opening of the Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, NC on February 1, 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro Four, the day of the first sit-in at a Woolworth’s white-only lunch counter in the North Carolina city in defiance of the Jim Crow segregation laws in the U.S. South. The four were Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Ezell Blair, Jr., all of them were students at the historically black college, North Carolina A & T, located in the city. Details including transcript and video after the jump.
That Woolworth department store has now become the The International Civil Rights Center and Museum commemorating the efforts of the Greensboro Four who returned to the lunch counter the next day and sat, without being served, as they were heckled. Their powerful protest against segregation laws became a strategy used by others in cities throughout the South. It was months later, in July 1960 that the Woolworth stores began to serve blacks at an integrated lunch counter.
Source: Historic Woolworth store now houses civil right museum
See also:
- Transcript: Civil Rights Museum opens in Greensboro, N.C.
- Complete Coverage: Int’l Civil Rights Museum Grand Opening
- Sit-in vet: ‘Never request permission to start a revolution’
- Sit-ins reignited the civil rights movement 50 years ago
- The sit-ins that changed America
- The Sit-Ins Remembered: A fight for much more than a hamburger
- The Counter Revolution
Photo: Mark Pellegrini via Creative Commons
YouTube Link
YouTube Link –
Civil Rights Museum Grand Opening: Greensboro Four Sit-In 50th Anniversary Video 2-1-10
