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The Lunch Counter Protests: How four college students started a nationwide movement
Thanks to what we called “Jim Crow laws,” African Americans weren’t welcome at department store lunch counters throughout the segregated South. They could buy food, but they had to pick it up as a to-go order. The seats at the counter were for white customers only.
On Feb. 1, 1960 — 65 years ago Saturday — four young students at North Carolina A&T sat down at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and declined to leave.
This launched a series of protests that would spread to more than 60 cities throughout the South and would be a landmark moment in the struggle for Civil Rights.
Four Freshmen Start a Nationwide Protest Movement
Four African-American freshmen students at North Carolina A&T University were talking late one night in January of 1960 about the life of African-Americans in the South. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education had been aimed at desegregating schools, but results were slow in coming to schools — and to other public places like restaurants and bus stations — throughout the South.
One of the four had traveled to New York by bus the previous summer and was astonished to find lunch counters and bus stations and so on weren’t segregated there. The students dared each other to do something that would change their lives — and the country — forever.
The plan: March up to the whites-only lunch counter at the Woolworth’s dime store in downtown Greensboro, sit down and refuse to leave until they were served. Sit-in protests had been held around the country and the South in the 1940s and 1950s, but had failed to get much attention. The Greensboro Four contacted media outlets to ensure their efforts would be covered.
Dressed in their Sunday best, the four visited Woolworth’s on Feb. 1, 1960. They bought toothpaste, notebooks and other small items at various counters in the store, carefully saving the receipts so they could prove they were paying customers.
They then sat down at the lunch counter and politely asked if they could place their orders.
“We don’t serve Negroes,” the waiter told them, suggesting they place a take-out order at the stand-up counter. “Well, you served us over there,” one of the four replied, indicating the rest of the dimestore. “Why not here?”
The store manager then came over and asked them to leave. They declined and instead opened their school books and began to study. By the time police showed up, reporters and photographers were already there. Word of the protests had spread.
When the Greensboro Four returned to the lunch counter the next day, they were joined by 20 more students from N.C. A&T, Bennett College, Women’s College — now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro — and Dudley High School.
By the fourth day of the protest, more than 300 people had joined and the protest had expanded to a lunch counter at a nearby Kress dime store.
By the end of the week, students in Winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh and Charlotte had begun similar protests. At some stores, white men showed up to verbally harass and to throw food at protesters. Sales at boycotted stores dropped by a third.
On July 25, 1960, the Greensboro Woolworth’s integrated its lunch counter. Counters at other stores throughout the South did the same over the coming months. Four years after that , the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would mandate all businesses to desegregate.
Reactions to The Protest
![State Archives of North Carolina](https://media.spokesman.com/photos/2025/01/24/photo1.jpg)
State Archives of North Carolina
The sit-in movement spread across the South. Some sit-ins were peaceful. Others met with counter-protests by angry whites. And in some, protesters were joined by sympathetic white supporters. These two pictures are of a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Durham, N.C. on Feb. 10, 1960.
Sit-Ins Spread Across The South
By the end of February, there had been sit-in protests at more than 30 communities in seven states. By the end of 1960, more than 70,000 men and women had participated in sit-ins and picket lines. More than 30,000 had been arrested.
Here’s where notable sit-ins began in the South over the first few months of 1960:
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Remembering Greensboro
The old Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter has been preserved at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro and by the Greensboro History Museum. A four-seat portion is on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.