Photo Credit: PBS.org

From CNN.com:

Fifty years ago today, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond—freshman at North Carolina A&T University–took a stand by sitting at the Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter at the national chain’s Greensboro, North Carolina, store.

McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond were refused service February 1, 1960, but they sat their ground. The Greensboro Four’s, as they came to be known, act of civil defiance will be commemorated today with the grand opening of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro. This event will be a great start in commemorating Black History Month 2010.

Located in the 1929 F.W. Woolworth building where the sit-ins were launched, the museum boasts a section of the actual lunch counter where the Greensboro Four sat. The counter and stools have never been moved from their original footprints.

The February 1 sit-in was only the beginning of the Greensboro Four’s work. After the store closed for the day, the students returned to campus and recruited others, the only prerequisite being that fellow demonstrators refrain from violence.

Twenty-five students, including four women, took part in the protests the following day. By February 4, more than 300 students, including whites, were involved. A group returned to the store every day for several weeks.

The sit-ins, eventually more than 70 of them, spread across the South, making the Greensboro Four an important catalyst in the nation’s budding civil rights movement.

Three members of the Greensboro Four will attend the ceremony without their companion Richmond, who died in 1990 at age 49.