Who supported the greensboro four?
Greensboro Four
The Greensboro Four were four young Black men who staged the first sit-in at Greensboro: Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil. All four were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College.
They were influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) in , in which interracial activists rode across the South in buses to test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate bus travel.
The Greensboro Four, as they became known, had also been spurred to action by the brutal murder in of a young Black boy, Emmett Till, who had allegedly whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi store.
Did you know?
The former Woolworth's in Greensboro now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which features a restored version of the lunch counter where the Greensboro Four sat. Part of the original counter is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Sit-In Begins
Blair, Richmond, McCain and McNeil planned their protest carefully, and enlisted the help of a local white businessman, Ralph Johns, to put their plan into action.
On February 1, , the four students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, where the official policy was to refuse service to anyone but whites.
Denied service, the four young men refused to give up their seats.
Police arrived on the scene but were unable to take action due to the lack of provocation. By that time, Johns had already alerted the local media, who had arrived in full force to cover the events on television.
Online biography for kids Brown, an accomplished Indigenous quilt maker, is of Lakota descent and the great-great granddaughter of Chief Sitting Bull. Your Profile. Email Updates. The Greensboro Four stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with more students from local colleges.The Greensboro Four stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with more students from local colleges.
Sit-Ins Spread Nationwide
By February 5, some students had joined the protest at Woolworth’s, paralyzing the lunch counter and other local businesses. Heavy television coverage of the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a sit-in movement that quickly spread to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people joined in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, beaches, hotels and other establishments.
Some of the first sit-ins during the civil rights movement were organized by history teacher Clara Luper and the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City in By the end of March , the movement had spread to 55 cities in 13 states.
Though many were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, national media coverage of the sit-ins brought increasing attention to the civil rights movement.
In response to the success of the sit-in movement, dining facilities across the South were being integrated by the summer of At the end of July, when many local college students were on summer vacation, the Greensboro Woolworth’s quietly integrated its lunch counter.
Four Black Woolworth’s employees—Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones and Charles Best—were the first to be served.
SNCC
To capitalize on the momentum of the sit-in movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April
Over the next few years, SNCC served as one of the leading forces in the civil rights movement, organizing Freedom Rides through the South in and the historic March on Washington in , at which Martin Luther King Jr.
gave his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech.
SNCC worked alongside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to push passage of the Civil Rights Act of , and would later mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War.
As its members faced increased violence, however, SNCC became more militant, and by the late s it was advocating the “Black Power” philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC’s chairman from ) and his successor, H.
Rap Brown.
The greensboro four biography for kids After high school graduation, McNeil's family moved to New York City to seek better job opportunities. The four men who were denied service at a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, pose in front of the store on February 1, The Belles resolved to serve as look-outs when the four men took their seats at the lunch counter on the first day. Sign Up.By the early s, SNCC had lost much of its mainstream support and was effectively disbanded.
Greensboro Sit-In Impact
The Greensboro Sit-In was a critical turning point in Black history and American history, bringing the fight for civil rights to the national stage. Its use of nonviolence inspired the Freedom Riders and others to take up the cause of integration in the South, furthering the cause of equal rights in the United States.
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Citation Information
- Article Title
- Greensboro Sit‑In
- Author
- Editors
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- HISTORY
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- Date Accessed
- January 17,
- Publisher
- A&E Television Networks
- Last Updated
- January 25,
- Original Published Date
- February 4,
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