Civil rights movement


As Greensboro evolved into one of North Carolina's primary cities, changes began to occur within its traditional social structure. On February 1, 1960, four black college students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at an all-white Woolworth's lunch counter, and refused to leave after they were denied service. The four students purchased small items in other parts of the store and kept their receipts, then sat down at the lunch counter and asked to be served. After being denied service, they produced their receipts and asked why their money was good everywhere else at the store, but not at the lunch counter.[21] Hundreds of others soon joined in this sit-in, which lasted several months. Such protests quickly spread across the South, ultimately leading to the desegregation of Woolworth's and other chains. The original lunch counter and stools where the four first sat are still in their original location, now home to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum (though a section of the counter is also on display at the Smithsonian[22]). The museum opened on February 1, 2010, the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins.[23]

After the desegregation of Woolworth's and other minor concessions by Greensboro's white community, a brief period of patience and negotiation was followed by further protests in 1962 and 1963, culminating in the largest civil rights protest to take place in North Carolina history during May and June 1963. In addition to the desegregation of public accommodations, protestors sought economic and social justice, such as hiring policies based on merit and the integration of public schools. Marches of over 2,000 protesters per night took place in Greensboro's segregated central business district. William Thomas and A. Knighton Stanley, coordinators of Greensboro's local CORE chapter, invited Jesse Jackson, then a student at A&T to join the protests, and Jackson quickly rose to prominence as a student leader and public representative of the protest movement. To invoke arrest by violating segregation rules of local businesses, trespassing, and other non-violent breaches of the law, soon became a primary tactic of the protestors, especially among college and high school students. Seeking to overflow city jails and overburden municipal resources, at one point approximately 1,400 blacks occupied Greensboro's jails, which drew serious attention from both Greensboro's mayor and Governor of North Carolina Terry Sanford. In the end, the protests achieved gains toward racial equality in the form of further desegregation, reformed hiring policies in city government, and commitments to progress by Greensboro's mayor and Governor Sanford, who declared, "Anyone who hasn't received this message doesn't understand human nature." However, though these concessions helped build progressive momentum, significant change in race relations came about at a painfully slow pace, and verbal commitments from white leadership in 1963 proved to be more symbolic victories than substantial ones.[24]

In spite of this period of progress, old wounds had yet to heal. On November 3, 1979, members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) were holding an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally, when a group of KKK and neo-Nazis caravaned into the Morningside Heights neighborhood where the rally was being held and ambushed the protest. Four local TV news stations filmed the event as it happened. Although a pistol likely was fired by a CWP organizer (allegedly into the air) and the Klan caravan was beaten with sticks prior to stopping, only the anti-Klan protesters were injured and killed.[25] Five CWP members died and seven were wounded. Television footage of the event was shown nationwide and around the world, and the event became known as the Greensboro Massacre. The accused Klansman and neo-Nazis all were acquitted by an all-white jury in two separate criminal trials. In 1985, a civil suit found five police officers and two other individuals liable for $350,000 in damages to be paid to the Greensboro Justice Fund.




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