Ezell Blair Jr, David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil were four young students from the North Carolina A&T State Unicersity, all African Americans. Influenced by the movements led by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and great followers of Mahatma Gandhi and their form of resistance known as "nonviolence", the four young people decided to stage their own form of protest against racial segregation.
They chose the Greensboro Woolworth cafeteria, known for its policy of serving whites only. On February 1, 1960, the four students entered the cafeteria, sat down and asked for coffee. The waiter refused to serve them, urged them to leave and when they refused he called the police; while it was coming, the local customers proffered all kinds of insults and threats against them, but the four African Americans remained seated without responding to the provocations, enduring with great coldness the great tension generated by the verbal aggressions of the indignant white clients of the cafeteria.
The police did not arrive alone, since a white friend of the four students named Ralph Jones had warned the newspapers and the televisions. In absence of any provocation on the part of African-Americans and, most likely, mainly due to the presence of the press, the police could not proceed with their arrest. They remained seated without being served until the store closed its doors.
If the staff and customers of Woolworth thought the problem was over when the store closed that night they were very wrong. The next day "the four of Greensboro", as they ended up being known, returned to appear in the cafeteria, to sit down and ask to be taken care of; Again the waiters refused to serve them and were again rebuked by the white customers of the store. But the news of what happened had run like wildfire, and little by little they were joining more African-American students. The scene was repeated day after day and by February 5 the number of students who had joined the protest reached three hundred. The Woolworth cafeteria was collapsed and unable to serve its customers or serve meals.
The echo of the protest initiated by "the Greensboro four" was reaching a national level and by the end of March there were similar sit downs of black and white students in fifty-five cities of thirteen states. There were some arrests, but the national media echo achieved the objective of the protagonists of the first sit-in and put in the spotlight the policy of racial segregation that one hundred years after the Civil War continued to prevail in many states of the country.
Throughout the summer of 1960 numerous stores of all types in the southern states were admitting the presence of African-American clients. Greensboro's Woolworth Cafe did it almost secretly during college summer vacations. Taking advantage of the tug created by the symbolic protest of "the Greensboro four" in North Carolina, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded, which played a leading role in organizing the 1963 march on Washington and other famous protests. However, over the years it evolved towards less peaceful positions and ended up dissolving.
