Scholar Renders Deft History of Civil Rights Era: Even after nearly 50 years, the names bear repeating: Franklin McCain, David Richmond, Ezell Blair and Joseph McNeil.
They were freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University on Feb. 1, 1960, when they took their seats at the Whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro. Four young Blacks tired of segregation laws, they were refused service and asked to leave. But they remained until the counter closed, and when they walked back to their dorm exhilarated, they had set in motion an act of civil disobedience - the sit-in - that took the civil rights movement by storm.
The next day, 25 sit-in protesters showed up. Then 63 filled all but two seats at Woolworth's. The protest spilled over to the nearby Kress department store, and as word spread across North Carolina and across the South, so did the sit-in: By mid-April, more than 50,000 protesters - ordinary Americans, most of them young - had attacked Jim Crow at the counter.
