Greensboro Four were yours truly Joe McNeil, David Richmond, Junior Blair and Frank McCain. We all lived in the same dormitory. I think we were all very young.
I was the youngest, I was 17. I reacted to the Jim Crow South with anger. I did not believe for one minute that I was a second-to-last citizen. That I was inferior in any way to whites, greens, whatever. I couldn't live the lie.
We decided to take a stand. Let's go. Let's do it. So we purchased small items, sundry items, to establish the fact that we were customers.
And then we sat down on the stool and asked for a cup of coffee. And the store manager told us that he wasn't on service. The local establishment grossly underestimated our anger and the ability to hang in there. So when we were leaving the store, the Associated Press was there. And they said, hey boys, what you gonna do?
We said, well, we're gonna come back. And we're gonna keep coming back until you decide to serve us. We started growing. First day four, the second day, probably 16 or 20. It was organic. It's mind of its own, kept growing.
We decided that whatever actions we were going to take, they were going to be non-violent. We remained non-violent. On the third day, it started to get rough.
Any time we could have been carried out of that store and find box. We didn't want to be barters. We had to do what we needed to do. I was a student at Fisk University in Nashville. February 1st, 1960, we heard that four young black men sat in at a lunch counter in Greensboro.
We had our first sit-in in Nashville on February 13th. I'm really amused sometimes because people say, oh, you were so brave. And the truth is, I was afraid the whole time. But the choice was to do what was necessary to end segregation, or to tolerate segregation.
And that just was not acceptable. Greensboro became the message. It was like if they can do it in Greensboro, we too can do it.
There were young people and people not so young, adults, in major cities outside of the South. Participating, sitting in at lunch counters, or they would picket in the stores to support the students in itself. And you had people like Martin Luther King Jr. saying things like by sitting down, we were standing up for the very best in the American tradition. And I think that's really important for people to know that it was ordinary people, quote-unquote ordinary, like themselves, who did everything for the Civil Rights Movement, that it was really a people's movement. These young people injected something very meaningful, something really beautiful.
So you may not have a lot of money, you may not have a lot of power, but you have what Dr. King and Gandhi and others call soul power. Just using your body as a non-violent instrument, as a tool, you can change things. You can inspire hundreds and thousands and millions of people. Speak up.
Just speak up. I walked away with an attitude that if our country is screwed up, don't give up. Unscrew it.
Don't give up. Which in retrospect is pretty good for a bunch of teenagers.