On Feb. 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, four friends walked into the Woolworth’s store and sat down at the lunch counter. They sat patiently but employees refused to serve them. As some White customers shouted racial slurs, the store manager called the police. When the police officer arrived, he escorted the four friends out of the diner. The store closed early that day.

Joseph McNeil was one of the four friends at the lunch counter that historic day. Joseph and his friends were students at the historically Black college North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro. On Sept. 4, 2025, McNeil passed away at the age of 83. During his lifetime, he was interviewed many times about the role that he and his fellow college students played that day. At the time, Blacks could buy school supplies at Woolworth’s or pay for take-out food, but they were not allowed to be served food at the ‘Whites-only’ lunch counter. “We thought the right thing to do was to right a wrong,” said McNeil decades later. As college students, they were aware that things were changing in the country and they wanted the respect given to others every day in America. “We stayed because we did not want to just win the battle, we wanted to win the war.”

The day after their sit-in, other Black students from their campus went along to peacefully protest and within a few weeks, hundreds of Blacks went to the Woolworth’s lunch counter every day. Some White women from the University of North Carolina went too as word spread up and down the east coast. By the end of March, only eight weeks after the first lunch counter sit-in, protests had spread to 54 other cities. Soon, over 50,000 people were participating in lunch counter sit-ins across America. In Nashville, 20-year-old John Lewis started a sit-in which quickly grew in numbers. He told the newspapers, “if they can do it over in Greensboro, we can do it here in Nashville.” During his lifetime, Lewis became a Congressman and a pivotal civil rights leader revered by citizens, activists and politicians of the era.

Joseph McNeil and his friends continued their quest for equality and six months after their first sit-in at Woolworth’s, the company desegregated the lunch counters across America. Martin Luther King, Jr., described the students’ actions as one of the most significant nonviolent catalysts of the civil rights movement. After McNeil graduated from college with a degree in engineering physics, he served in the Air Force including time as a navigator during the Vietnam War. He worked for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), married Ina Brown, and retired from the military in 2000 with the rank of major general.

Now, the counter from Greensboro’s Woolworth’s store is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. It represents an era of change and activism as equal rights and civil rights were at the forefront of life in America. It took courage and conviction for those four young college students to sit at that lunch counter. They knew it was the right thing to do to stand up to injustice. Decades later, John Lewis would call these types of pivotal moments ‘necessary trouble’. Lewis was passionate about staying true to one’s moral convictions and urged others to stand firm in their beliefs and challenge injustice. Today’s political climate requires courage as well as patience and moral conviction as well as respect. Sometimes, political and cultural change requires sitting while other times such change requires nonviolent protests. Choose your method. Choose it wisely. Take action often.