Greensboro+Sit-ins

=Greensboro Sit-ins=

February 1st 1960
//A Civil Rights Movement protest by African Americans began in Greensboro, Carolina.//

The very first sit-ins had occured during the 1943 in Chicago by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), at the store counter. However the protest did not catch many of the media and public attention, and therefore was unsuccessful to accomplish Civil Rights Movement protest. Despite the failure of the previous protest, the four black college students - Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair Jr successfully protested through the same method. The four black college students sat down at the "whites-only" section of the Woolworths department store lunch counter on the 1st of February, 1960. The counter they sat was the one of many segregated facilities in Greensboro, Carolina. The four black students were refused to be served, because of their colour. This provoked the black students and they refused to leave the store until it was the closing time of the store. The students returned to the shop from next morning onwards, and occupied the same counter knowing that they won't be served a thing or even when they had food poured over them. The amount of protesters accumulated day by day which in the end, reached up to hundreds. Many students were jailed, yet they still continued to sit-in. This was partially the non-violent and peaceful protest from an idea of Martin Luther King. They counted on this protest as a potentially powerful method to introduce major changes between black and whites, and hence, desegregation. Believing that they can make a difference, and believing that the segregation was only able to happen because they accepted segregation, they remained protesting until the store was forced to close down.

The amount of media and public attention that this event had gained created positive impacts later on. The newspapers caught published the growth of this protest back in 1960's. The sin-in protest had spread and had influenced places other than Greensboro, such as Winston-Salem and Durham. Other than lunch counters, sit-ins also protested about the segregations of swimming pools, transport facilities, libraries, museums, art galleries, beach and parks. In the end, 70,000 people came involved in this protest, and played a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement of 1960.



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[] [] [] 27th May 2009