History isn’t always made – and changed – in the spotlight. As often as not, it starts in the shadows.
On Feb. 1, 1960, four North Carolina A&T students walked into the F.W. Woolworth Co. on South Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter and politely asked for service. It was refused. Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond remained calm in the face of injustice. Most importantly, they remained, and they kept returning every day with more and more Black men and women.
Those four young men sparked a sustained movement of civil disobedience that quickly spread to 78 cities across the South and nine states. Woolworth opened its lunch counters six months later as the nation slowly awoke from the darkness of segregation. It was an act of courage and moral righteousness that could have gone different ways.
“If I were lucky, I’d be going off to jail for a long, long time,” McCain remembers of that first day sitting at that counter. “If I were not so lucky, then I would be going back to my campus in a pine box.”
The “Greensboro Four” stepped into the spotlight. However, they were merely the most celebrated members in that city’s fraternity of civil rights heroes. They didn’t start the mission, they just merely brought it to prominence.
Four years before the Woolworth sit-in became a flash point – and just more than a mile up the road now named after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – six Black men initiated their own act of defiance in the battle against civil injustice.
On a golf course.
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