The Sixties Began Fifty-One Years Ago Today
It’s become a commonplace to say that the sixties began on February 1, 1960, when four black students from North Carolina Ag and Tech sat down at the lunch counter of a Greensboro Woolworth’s in defiance of segregation.
But the February 1 sit-in wasn’t the first — students and other young activists had been protesting at lunch counters semi-regularly for years by then. What made Greensboro different is the way that it caught on, the way that it spread.
And it started to spread fifty-one years ago today.
There were lunch counter sit-ins in two new North Carolina cities on February 8. In Durham, more than a dozen black students from North Carolina College, joined by four white students from Duke, sat down in a Woolworth’s
