Four black students sit at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworth's, sparking the Greensboro sit-ins

The sit-ins were very significant to the movement. They symbolized a change in the mood of African-American people. Up until then, we had accepted segregation — begrudgingly — but we had accepted it. We had spoken against it, we had made speeches, but no one had defied segregation. At long last after decades of acceptance, four freshman students at North Carolina A&T went into Woolworth and at the lunch counter they "sat-in." When told they would not be served, they refused to leave and this sparked a movement throughout the South. Black students in colleges throughout the South saw it on television they said "Hey man, look at what our brothers and sisters in Greensboro are doing. What's wrong with us? Why don't we go out and do the same thing?" And they went out, so it swept across the South like the proverbial wildfire, with students rejecting segregation. With their very bodies they obstructed the wheels of injustice.

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