The 50th Anniversary of the Famous Sit-in at Woolworth's

Today is the 50th anniversary of the famous sit-in by four black college students at Woolworth's five-and dime store. America in 1960 was primarily segregated in the South despite the previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and 1955, along with Rosa Park's bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957. There was a group of four determined young black college students who decided to protest the whites-only policy at the lunch counter at Woolworth's. Stools were only provided by whites to sit on. Blacks weren't served at the lunch counter. The four young college students who protested the whites-only policy were Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Billy Smith, and Clarence Henderson. They were schooled in the philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which was what the Indian leader Gandhi used in the Indian Independence Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. later adopted that philosophy when it came to fighting for the civil rights of black Americans.

On February 1, 1960, four students from an all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College walked into a Woolworth's five-and-dime store with the intention of ordering lunch. However, the manger, who was Clarence Harris, decided to maintain the lunch counter's strict whites-only policy. Franklin McCain was one of the four young men who shoved history forward by refusing to budge. McCain remembers the anxiety he felt when he went to the store that Monday afternoon. He and Joseph McNeil, Billy Smith, and Clarence Henderson had launched plans to stage their protest. He stated how he felt after he sat at the lunch counter fifteen seconds after he sat down. "I had a feeling of liberation and restored manhood. I had a natural high. And I truly felt almost invincible. Mind you (I was) just sitting on a dumb stool and not having asked for service yet." McCain says. A little later an elderly woman of eighty years put her hands on his shoulder and told him that she was very proud of him and he should've done it ten years earlier.

The protest continued. The second day there were fifteen people that showed up to protest at the Woolworth's counter. On February 5, 1960, approximately 300 blacks showed up to protest the lunch counter policy at Woolworth's. The four young men who protested were not arrested. Harris, Woolworth's manager, was hoping the four black men would eventually give up after not being served at the counter. However, they were persistent in their efforts. Eventually, there was a bomb scare at the store and Harris had to close Woolworth's for approximately two weeks. Eventually, Woolworth's, along with Kress's a few blocks down, eventually desegregated their lunch counters. The persistence of the four young college students in combatting segregation behind the lunch counter paid off. Eventually other stores followed suit. And the rest is history.