The Greensboro Four were four young black men who staged the first sit-in at Greensboro. They were Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil. All four were students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College.
The Greensboro Four were influenced by the non-violent protest techniques practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress for racial equality in 1947.
Participants in the Freedom Rides were interracial activists who rode across the South in buses to test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation and interstate bus travel. The Greensboro Four were also spurred into action by the brutal murder of young Emmett Till in 1955 who was killed for “allegedly” whistling at a white woman in a Mississippi store. On February 1, 1960, the four students sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. Denied service, the four young men refused to give up their seats and this is their story.
Understanding all too well the difficulties children of mixed race have in navigating both sides in the cultural tug of war, it is important to hear from them directly. We included Meghan Markle, whose father is German and mother is African American, as she is the first American who has married into the Royal family since 1937.
Albert Jackson was born a slave in Delaware around 1856 and his mother Ann Maria Jackson fled in 1858 with her seven children to Philadelphia, where African-American abolitionist William Still ran a station of the Underground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves get to Canada. The family settled in Toronto and in 1882, when many Black men worked as labourers or in the service industry, Jackson landed a government-appointed job as a letter carrier. On his first day, white postmen refused to train him because he was black, so he was reassigned to hall porter.