February 1, 1960

1960Four black students stage the first of the Greensboro sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.^[†]

The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in February to July 1960, primarily in the Woolworth store — now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum — in Greensboro, North Carolina, which led to the F. W. Woolworth Company department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. While not the first sit-in of the civil rights movement, the Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action, and also the best-known sit-ins of the civil rights movement. They are considered a catalyst to the subsequent sit-in movement, in which 70,000 people participated. This sit-in was a contributing factor in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).