WOOLWORTHS LUNCH COUNTER PROTEST

The food was bland, the coffee week, the atmosphere sterile. But the stools in this lunch counter are more treasured and more symbolic than any seed in a 5 star restaurant. What was served up at this very counter was the sweet and satisfying taste of freedom. This was the main stage of one of the greatest dramas of the 1960s, the so called sit in civil rights protest. It was about 80 feet long as duels were classic diner pieces covered with vinyl backed with chrome. One other feature of these stools made a lot of people uncomfortable. You could only sit on them if you were white. It wasn't an official company-wide woolworth policy, but each store manager was allowed to segregate the counter if he chose to and the department store giant was a landmark of Main Street America. So when four young Greensboro men wanted to challenge the invisible color line, date was February 1st, 1960. The four teenagers, freshmen at a local university, entered woolworths and began shopping for school supplies. It was a calculated move meant to point out the hypocrisy of a store which would accept their money at the checkout, but not at the lunch counter. Receipts in hand, two by two, they approached the whole thing expected to be cracked over the head, hauled off to jail, or both. And sure enough, a police officer soon appeared. And he started to pace the counter back and forth, and as he walked back and forth. He started to pound his night stick in his hand. But after he pays three times with his nightstick, I said to myself, we've got him. He really doesn't know what to do. They would soon be called, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, a zell Blair, and Joseph McNeil. The defiance of pride visible on their faces would be severely tested in the months ahead. Every day, the Greensboro four and a growing number of black and white supporters returned to the lunch counter, taking shifts, they occupied the counter stools all day, and during insults and threats from hostile bystanders. With newspapers, television and radio closely following the protest, sit in spread throughout the south. Segregated lunch counters in 54 cities were taken over by the protesters. Still, the management of the Greensboro woolworth's stuck by its guns and the corporate bosses for 6 months protesters and waitresses glared at each other across this counter. Finally, on July 25th, 1960, the FW woolworth company ordered the Greensboro store to give in. Throughout the department store chain, the lunch counters were officially desegregated. As time went on, it ceased to matter because you could come in around lunchtime and you could see alternating almost black, white, black, white, black, white, patrons, and nobody paid much attention to it. And you ask yourself, I did quite often. What was all the fuss about? What was all the mistreatment about me? What was this thing that people are so afraid of? The old lunch pound Greensboro woolworth's closed for good in 1993. But before the store was shut down, two 8 foot sections of the surviving original lunch counter were removed. One was sent to the Smithsonian Institution and the other to the Greensboro historical museum. The remaining 30 feet of the original countertop remains in place in the cavernous old building. The old woolworths is being converted into a civil rights museum, and even though it has not yet officially opened, visitors can drop by an actually sit on one of the famous stools. And thanks to what happened here in 1960, everybody is welcome to take a seat.