1 February
‘Negro student demonstrations against segregated eating facilities have raised grave questions in the South over the future of the region’s race relations.
‘On Sunday night, 31 Jan 1960 one of the students sat thinking about discrimination.
"Segregation makes me feel that I’m unwanted," McNeil A. Joseph said later in an interview. ’I don’t want my children exposed to it.’
The 17-year-old student from Wilmington, N. C., said that he approached three of his classmates the next morning and found them enthusiastic over a proposal that they demand service at the lunch counter of a downtown variety store.
About 4.45pm they entered the F. W. Woolworth Company store on North Elm Street in the heart of Greensboro. Mr. Joseph said he bought a tube of tooth paste and the others made similar purchases. Then they sat down at the lunch counter. ’ New York Times, February 1960
The Woolworth’s Five and Dime in Greensboro, North Carolina, became the catalyst that lead to the end of segregation, when, on 1 February 1960, four black students took vacant seats in the ‘whites only’ area of the store’s lunch counter.
They were ignored by the waitress when they ordered coffee but still they sat, returning every day, their numbers growing. Before the end of the week some 400 students - black and white - turned up in support and Woolworth’s agreed to desegregate its lunch counter. A year later, restaurants and lunch counters in 126 southern US cities followed.
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