“I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.īy the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. College,” one of the students said.īy next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. SEYMOUR CHWASTĪt four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. Social media can’t provide what social change has always required.
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