Fight for Rights:
Bold sit-ins at lunch counter ‘sick’ of segregation, college pals act
ALL IT TOOK was five words out of Joseph McNeil’s mouth. Five words that would ultimately help drive Jim Crow into a ravine.
In the winter of 1960, McNeil had been visiting his parents in Harlem. The North Carolina A&T freshman was on break from school, and it was time to head back to Greensboro. He boarded a Greyhound bus and began his journey down the East Coast. At rest stops, he’d get off the bus and stretch his legs. But as he headed farther South, he became aware of something for the first time: the attitudes of others’ toward him began to change.
He hadn’t changed, he thought. He was still the same polite, respectful young man he’d always been. Having grown up in North Carolina he was all too familiar with the trappings of segregation. His parents had moved from Wilmington years earlier to find work since decent jobs for blacks were scarce down South.
McNeil, however, remained with relatives in Wilmington, returning North to attend the third and eighth grades in Harlem as well as for periodic visits.
When the bus pulled into Richmond, Va., McNeil entered the bus depot. It had a lunch counter, and he was hungry. There, he quickly felt the tightening vise of Jim Crow. A sign at the counter read, “WHITES ONLY.” If McNeil wanted to eat, he would have to go around to the back and order his food. He refused — and walked out.
When he got back to campus, he met with three close friends — Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and Dave Richmond — in his dorm room and described what happened. He concluded his story by uttering what would become five fateful words: “I’m sick of this s--t.”
“We had a strong need to do something, to not just sit back and complain,” McNeil, now 73, says in his split-level home on Long Island, where he lives with his wife, Lakota, a great-great-granddaughter of Chief Sitting Bull.
They decided they needed to take action and discussed their options. They had fears about what might happen to them — they could be beaten or even killed. “That’s the outside,” he says. “But on the inside, (there was) a reservoir of strength.”
So in the early evening of Feb. 1, 1960, the four men, in dress shirts and ties, walked into a Woolworth’s on Elm St. in downtown Greensboro. To show they were good customers, they selected small items and brought them to the cash register to pay. McNeil recalls buying a tube of toothpaste. Then, nonchalantly, they took seats at the lunch counter and asked to be served. They were denied service — and ordered to leave. But they didn’t. They remained seated, politely requesting that they be served whenever anyone approached.
While such sit-ins had been occurring dating back a decade, this one would inspire a generation of young men and women to take action.
“Civil disobedience. It was the right thing morally,” McNeil says. “We had to embrace some pretty deep concepts: to endure. To challenge injustice when you see it. Rather than a self-preservation thing, it was a giving of oneself. Selflessness.”
The police were called. An officer arrived and paced back and forth behind the students, slapping his billy club into his hand. McNeil recalls how his friend Frank McCain described their fear as they sat at the counter: “‘We weren’t sure we were going to walk out the same way we came in. We could have gone out in pine boxes,’ ” McNeil quoted his friend.
Frustrated, the officer left. After a few hours of repeatedly being denied service, the four departed unharmed when the store closed, but not before exchanging words with an elderly white woman who had been watching the counter staff deny them service for hours. McNeil recalls her resting her hand on one of their shoulders
and saying, “Boys, I’m disappointed with you.”
McCain looked at her and said, “Ma’am, you don’t know us. Why would you be disappointed in us?”
The woman, who appeared to be in her 80s, replied, “Because it took you so long to do what you’re doing.” The guys were floored. “It was like a shot of adrenaline,” McNeil says.
Joe Spivey, a photographer who had been alerted to the protest, snapped a photo of the four men as they made their way back to campus. And with that image, the “Greensboro Four” were born. The black-and-white photograph hangs today in McNeil’s living room.
When they got back to their dorm, they urged others to return with them the next day, on the condition they do so nonviolently. Not all of them felt the same way, but enough did. “There was no master plan,” McNeil says. “It all happened spontaneously.” The following day, more students took part and the media swarmed.
As the movement gained momentum, the four organizers received threatening phone calls, often from white-supremacist types who would address them by name, letting them know they’d be waiting if they returned. During one sit-in, McNeil was arrested, the first of two times he would be detained for protesting at segregated eateries.
“If this is what we need to do in order to bring this down, we’ll do it,” he recalls thinking.
By summer, sit-ins had caught on across the South. On July 25, 1960, after months of bad publicity — and losing an estimated $200,000 in revenue — Woolworth’s integrated all its lunch counters across the country. A portion of the original lunch counter is permanently displayed in the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro.
McNeil later enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in South Dakota, where he met his future wife. He piloted planes over the North Pole, performing midair refueling of bombers that were loaded with atomic weapons as part of the Strategic Air Command, and flew numerous missions in Vietnam. He retired in 2000 after reaching the rank of brigadier general.
Of the four, only McNeil and Blair are left. Blair, 74, who changed his name to Jibreel Khazan, now lives in New Bedford, Mass.
Today, reflecting on his life in the movement, McNeil cites police brutality and, particularly, institutional racism, as issues that remain unresolved. Does McNeil feel that lingering, deep-seated racism has undermined the impact his generation made?
“We helped a lot of people shed prejudice,” he says. “That’s a tough thing to carry through life. It’s sickness. So we helped in that regard. It was a damn good effort. You’ll have to look long and look hard to find so many people to come forward — diverse people, courageous people — going into harm’s way. People that, although they didn’t know it, were helping make America strong, closer to the dream. Full participants in the American Dream.”