Reflections on the Greensboro Four

Joseph McNeil

Tuesday, 15 Feb 2011 at 8:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union

On February 1, 1960, four African American freshman from North Carolina A&T State University had had enough of continued segregation in the South and sat down at Greensboro's "whites only" Woolworth lunch counter. They promised to return to the lunch counter everyday until they were served. The number of sit-in student demonstrators increased each day and soon the movement spread to other lunch counters in fifty-four cities in nine states. The Greensboro sit-ins continued for five months until the F. W. Woolworth Company finally agreed to integrate their lunch counters. Joseph McNeil of the Greensboro Four who started it all, will tell his story.

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Joseph McNeil was an Air Force ROTC student. A Wilmington native, he graduated from Williston Senior High. McNeil received a degree in engineering physics from A&T in 1963. McNeil was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force in 1964 and was a navigator on the KC-135 Stratotanker air refueling/cargo aircraft. In 1969, he joined the Air Force Reserves, retiring as a major general. He also worked at IBM and Bankers Trust in New York and as a stockbroker for E.F. Hutton in Fayetteville. He retired from the Federal Aviation Administration, where he was a manager of the FAA's New York Flight Standards Division, Eastern Region, Europe and Africa. McNeil has lived in Hempstead, New York, since 1970. He received the village of Hempstead's Medal of Honor in 2002.



Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted
by Malcolm Gladwell
OCTOBER 4, 2010, The New Yorker
Social media can't provide what social change has always required.

At 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. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

"I'd like a cup of coffee, please," one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

"We don't serve Negroes here," she replied.

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. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. "You're acting stupid, ignorant!" she said. They didn't move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn't move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. "I'll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College," one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro's "Negro" secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. "Here comes the wrecking crew," one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine's College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. "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. "The answer was always the same: It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go." Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade,and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

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Cosponsored By:

• Ames Public Library
• Black Graduate Student Association
• Dean of Students Office
• History
• Human Sciences
• Multicultural Student Programming Advisory Council
• Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)