Joseph McNeil, who jolted the civil rights movement with a surge of youth activism when he and three other freshmen from a historically Black college held a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. — a nonviolent protest that motivated students across the nation to rally, march and picket — died on Thursday in a hospice in Port Jefferson, N.Y. on Long Island. He was 83.
His wife, Ina McNeil, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.
On the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1960, Mr. McNeil and three classmates from what is now North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro approached the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s, sat on the turquoise- and salmon-colored vinyl seats and nervously ordered coffee.
Mr. McNeil said that he and his friends — Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond — wanted to provoke a confrontation and, they hoped, force an immediate change in policy at the five-and-dime chain store. Woolworth’s allowed Black people to shop at the store for school supplies and other items, and to use the lunch counter’s carryout section. They were prohibited from using seats at the counter and being waited on.
“What we did, we thought was the right thing to do to clear up a wrong,” Mr. McNeil later told the Long Island newspaper Newsday, explaining that they had grown up with a sense of worth that made them increasingly fed up with Jim Crow discrimination and eager to be treated with basic decency and respect.
“This was not in the days of the water hoses or dogs,” Mr. McNeil added. “If there was violence, it was the pushy style; things being thrown, cigarettes being thrown onto clothes, attempts at physical intimidation, verbal harassment. We stayed because we did not just want to win the battle. We wanted to win the war.”
They did not hold out much hope for local support from the Greensboro business community, they later said in interviews, but they sought to gain attention that might embarrass stockholders or executives at the chain’s New York headquarters.
The waitress took immediate exception to their presence. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she said.
She summoned her manager, who ordered the students to leave. They remained seated.
A police officer was called. But, the students later recalled, without grounds to arrest the students, he resigned himself to trailing behind them as he drummed his billy club into his palm. A few white customers spouted racial slurs, and a Black female dishwasher ridiculed them. “That’s why we can’t get anyplace today,” she said, calling them “troublemakers.” (Mr. McNeil told The Washington Post that he was “burned” by her remark for years but that he later grew to understand how he and his friends “threatened her way of life.”)
Mr. McNeil did not budge until the manager closed the store early.
When word reached campus, the four men were treated as heroes. They returned to the store daily, with more classmates, and were credited with igniting one of the nation’s most consequential student protest movements. By Feb. 5, hundreds stood in their ranks, including white women from Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now University of North Carolina at Greensboro).
Picketing began at Woolworth’s outlets up and down the East Coast; Yolande Betbeze Fox, a former Miss America from Alabama, was among the protesters in New York’s theater district carrying placards demanding an end to lunch-counter discrimination.
“I’m a Southern girl,” she told The New York Times. “But I’m a thinking girl.”
Before Greensboro, sit-ins had occurred only in the outer reaches of the South and in some Northern cities. By the end of February, students from two dozen colleges in eight Southern states requested equal service; by the end of March, lunch-counter protests had spread to 54 cities; and, by the end of April, more than 50,000 young people were participating in the fever of activism.
That May, Nashville became the first major city to integrate its lunch counters. “If they can do it in Greensboro, we, too, could do it,” John Lewis, who as a student activist led a successful sit-in in Nashville, and who decades later became a Democratic congressman from Georgia, remembered.
On July 25, six months after the initial sit-in in Greensboro, the Woolworth’s lunch counter desegregated and offered service to all.
David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the civil rights movement, said the Greensboro students had benefited from a culture of relative moderation in North Carolina. They were never firebombed or hosed down like demonstrators in the Deep South, he said in an interview, and the Greensboro Four, as Mr. McNeil and his three friends came to be known, “were able to take advantage of this culture.”
The students, Mr. Garrow added, achieved what seasoned leaders of the civil rights movement had long desired but could not pull off themselves: They spearheaded a nationwide protest movement and galvanized legions of students to join.
As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. struggled to build a nationwide movement after the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, it was “those four guys on Feb. 1 who really do set the Southern Black freedom struggle of the 1960s,” Dr. Garrow said.
“It kicked off a phenomenal, regionwide movement, of Black college students against segregated public lunch counters, and it led, very directly, very quickly, to the phenomenal meeting in Raleigh that created SNCC,” he added, referring to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
SNCC, an interracial group advocating for nonviolence, organized and prepared students for protests. The group was a major force behind the sit-in movement and a key player during the Freedom Rides — two crucial chapters that helped build momentum toward congressional passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars racial and other forms of discrimination.
Mr. McNeil said the role of students was critical to the survival of the civil rights struggle.
“We were students. Our needs were simple,” he recalled in an oral history interview with the historian William H. Chafe, who wrote a book on the Greensboro sit-in movement. “We had shelter, we had food, and we could take risks that the others couldn’t.”
Joseph Alfred McNeil was born on March 25, 1942, in Wilmington, N.C., the only child of Mildred and Alfred McNeil. His mother was a dietitian; and his father moved the family to New York when he got a job with an electrical company in Queens. But Mr. McNeil stayed close to his North Carolinian roots, living with an aunt in Wilmington and graduating from an all-Black high school there.
Moving freely in the North made segregation harder to bear, Mr. McNeil said, and that drove him to activism once he was in college.
Mr. McNeil was not the typical freshman arriving in the fall of 1959 at what was then the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina.
He had a photographic memory and quoted Shakespeare and Aristotle, according to Mr. Khazan, his freshman-year roommate. His conversation was not about people or material things, Mr. McCain remembered; it was concerned with ideals.
Throughout his first semester, he discussed taking action against segregation with three friends from his dormitory.
Returning to college after the holiday break that year, he was denied equal service at a bus station in Richmond, Va. He could have eaten a meal at the back of the bus station, but he chose not to, later describing the moment as “one of the many straws on the camel’s back.”
Some older Greensboro residents helped Mr. McNeil plan the sit-in at Woolworth’s but did not participate in it themselves. Ralph Johns, a politically progressive white storekeeper in town who had been urging local students for years to hold a sit-in, gave the Greensboro Four money and instruction. He told them to buy a few items from Woolworth’s and to keep the receipts before they ordered food.
“When the waitress says, ‘We don’t serve your kind here,’ you call her a liar,” Mr. Johns advised, “because you have the receipts to prove Woolworth’s serves Negroes at all the other counters.”
Once the sit-in was underway, Mr. Johns contacted the press and drew national attention to Greensboro.
Mr. McNeil graduated in 1963 with a degree in engineering physics and then served six years in the Air Force. He became a navigator on the KC-135, an aerial refueling plane, during the Vietnam War.
While stationed in South Dakota, he married Ina Brown, a quilt maker of Lakota descent. The two settled in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island, and Mr. McNeil joined the Air Force Reserve; he retired in 2000 with the rank of major general. Among other jobs, he worked for the Federal Aviation Administration, in charge of flight standards for several regions.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons, Alan, Joseph and Frank; a daughter, Jacqueline Jackson; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His son Ron died in March.
The Woolworth’s in Greensboro closed in 1993, and two years later the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History put on display a section of the lunch counter. Two of the Greensboro Four died before Mr. McNeil: Mr. Richmond in 1990 and Mr. McCain in 2014.
On the 30th anniversary of the protests, Mr. McNeil was asked by a reporter in Greensboro to reflect on the courage it took to challenge segregation.
“In hindsight, a heck of a lot,” he responded. “I don’t think we were as naïve as some folks have suggested. There were uncertainties. I think we had a sense of resolve, and I think it took a lot of courage.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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