Civil Rights

• All the businesses downtown Greensboro were segregated, such as Woolworths. Black people could shop here but they couldn’t sit at the lunch counter.
• 4 students at A&T State decided to do a sit-in as a form of protesting against segregation in Greensboro.

  They shopped first and proved they were customers with the receipt.

  They sat down at the lunch counter but staff didn’t do anything because they were about to close.
• The Greensboro 4 council linked up with other black universities such as Bennett and continued to do these sit-ins.

  They were abused, hit, spit on, and mistreated during their peaceful protest.

  These students would attract the attention of the Downtown Business Association which hoped these protests would be over by May.

  The council reaches out to Dudley High School and asked them to continue the sit-ins and boycotts when summer comes and the college students had to leave, which they agreed to.
• Many more sit-in protests that sprouted throughout the country following the Greensboro 4 and Dudley High students. More young people began to get involved in protests and maintained their non-violent tactics.


  Ella Baker- was at Shaw University in Raleigh, went to one of the trainings that the A&T college students held to teach young people to remain non-violent in these protests and was inspired to make the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
• SNCC moves into a city and remains there to teach people how to remain non-violent and how to protest without being villainized even when the time comes that SNCC has to leave.