Welcome to JFK in The Enduring Secret.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is episode 215, right as we swing into 1960, the last year of the Eisenhower administration, and as Kennedy was barreling toward a

November election win against Nixon.

As you know, I like to go on small wanders,

and rather than just giving you the rest of the timeline between 1960 and 1963,

I'm going to pause and tell you one of the most amazing stories of the civil rights movement. Of course,

there are so many, but this is one of my favorite. And it's a short little wander about the Greensboro

lunch counter sit-ins. This was a time when the move toward desegregation of schools was

quickly evolving into a more full-blown civil rights movement that

had been steadily gathering steam from 1954 on after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

And white opposition to this movement was growing in proportion.

And with some fringe elements already beginning to introduce or step up

the violence against the movement.

1960 saw the growth of a phenomenon that had been previously introduced into the civil rights

movement. It was the lunch counter sit-in, another brilliant and non-violent protests that would soon go viral as a result of the

actions of a group of students in Greensboro, North Carolina. Sit-ins were not exactly new. You can reach

back to notable events through civil rights history in 1939 in Virginia and in 1942 in Chicago, 49 in St. Louis and 52 in Baltimore.

All were notable, but the most famous one began on February 1, 1960,

when four young African-American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro.

The old Woolworth store was located at 132 Elm Street in Greensboro.

And back then, it was quite common for a small retail store like that to have a lunch counter.

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