When he was a college freshman, Franklin McCain decided it was time to act against segregation. On Feb. 1, 1960, he and three fellow students of his all-black college sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworth in Greensboro, N.C. “We had no notion that we’d even be served,” he later said. “What we wanted to do was serve notice, more than anything else, that we were going to be about trying to achieve some of the rights and privileges we were due as citizens of this country.”
The so-called Greensboro Four got no coffee that day, said The Washington Post. But they kept coming back, and within a week hundreds of supporters had joined them. “The best feeling of my life,” McCain later said, “was sitting on that dumb stool.” By the time the Woolworth in Greensboro served its first black customer six months later, the Greensboro Four had sparked “a movement of sit-ins across the country.”
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McCain later said that the Greensboro Four’s action had arisen from a simple question, said The New York Times: “At what point does a moral man act against injustice?” Their sit-in, along with the many that came before and after it, built the momentum that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its ban on segregation.
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