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Section of Lunch Counter from Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's now at Smithsonian Institution

The Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action in the African-American Civil Rights Movement, leading to increased national sentiment at a crucial period in American history.

On February 1, 1960, four African American students, Ezell A. Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, an all black college, sat down at a segregated lunch counter in the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's store. This lunch counter was not open to all. Although they were refused service, they were allowed to stay at the counter, sparking off sit-ins and economic boycotts that were a hallmark of the American civil rights movement.

These four students followed Martin Luther King's idea of peaceful protest. The first sit in caused the lunch counter to close early and the students were treated as idols in the movement by their college. The very next day there was a total of 24 students at the Woolworth lunch counter for the sit in. In just two months the sit-in movement spread to 54 cities in 9 states. By July 1960, the original four protesters were served lunch at the same Woolworth's counter. The lunch counter was now open to all after losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other stores, like in Atlanta, moved to desegregate. The media picked up this issue and spread it nationwide. Sit-ins were effective throughout the South in integrating other public facilities until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1993, a portion of the lunch counter was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. The Greensboro Historical Museum contains four chairs from the Woolworth counter along with photos of the original four protestors, a timeline of the events, and headlines from the media. This sit-in inspired all the others during and after the Civil Rights Movement.

Several documentaries have been produced about these men who sparked the sit in movement, including PBS' "February One" [1].

The Greensboro sit-ins began in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Greensboro sit-ins played a large role in spreading the civil rights movement to a larger audience and dramatizing segregation at a time when many, especially in the North, were not fully aware of its scope. The Greensboro sit-ins inspired civil rights groups to take up this tactic and use it to publicize segregation - beginning with lunch counters and spreading to other forms of public accommodation. The sit-in movement used the strategy of nonviolent resistance, which originated in Gandhi's Indian independence movement and was later brought to the Civil Rights movement by Martin Luther King. In July 1960, the Woolworth store in Greensboro finally agreed to desegregate its food counter after widespread publicity and hundreds of thousands of dollars loss in business. The sit-in, as a tactic, continued to be used against segregated lunch counters, transport facilities, art galleries, beaches, parks, swimming pools, libraries, and even museums around the South. However though it would seem that Greensboro had the first ever sit-in of its kind, the Dockum Sit-in (at the Dockum Drugstore in Wichita Kansas) was the very first sit-in to influence all those to later come.

• American Civil Rights Movement
• American Civil Rights Movement Timeline
• F.W. Woolworth Company
• February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four

• Object of History: Greensboro Lunch Counter
• Timeline of the Greensboro Sit-Ins
• "February One" documentary on PBS
• Greensboro 1960
• "About.com" Lunch counter sit-ins
• Greensboro Historical Museum
• Greensboro sit-ins--Launch of the civil rights movement
• Making Equality a Reality - History of Sit ins
• Greensboro VOICES--Civil Rights Oral Histories
• Civil Rights Movement Veterans ~ 1960