The Greensboro Lunch Counter
About 1960 (installed in the 1950s)
A short stretch of pink and grey lunch counter with four low stools stands on its own, looking exactly like the diner furniture of any American town in 1960. On the first of February that year four Black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, sat down at this counter in the F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked to be served. The store's policy was to serve Black customers standing, at the end of the counter, never seated. They were refused, and they stayed until closing time. The next day they came back with more students, and within weeks sit-ins had spread to more than fifty cities.
There is nothing to look at but the ordinariness of it, and that is the point. The counter is Formica, the stools are chrome and vinyl, the design is the standard Woolworth fitting. Notice that the section is a straight run with four seats, chosen to match the four young men of the first day. The museum has kept the surface unrestored. Nearby, a short film and interactive stations tell the story of the sit-in movement and invite visitors to sit and talk about it.
The Woolworth store closed in 1993, and the museum obtained this eight-foot section of the counter and four stools that year with the help of the company, which had at last integrated the counter in July 1960. The rest of the counter stays in Greensboro, where the store is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. This section has been shown here since 1994 and moved to the second floor when the building was renovated, becoming one of the museum's landmark objects. Pause here a moment and think about how much courage it took to sit down.
Did You Know? The four seats in this section match the four college students who sat down on the first day of the sit-in.
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