Shining City Audio, a John Meacham and C-13 original studio.

February 1st, 1960, the Greensboro North Carolina sit-ins begin.

I'm John Meacham and this is Reflections of History.

They were named Ezel Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond.

Students at a historically black university in Greensboro, North Carolina, before walked into a wall worth on this date, took seats at a segregated lunch counter and ordered coffee and donuts.

They didn't get them.

What they got instead was immortality, immortality as courageous soldiers of democracy and of justice.

What began in Greensboro as a protest against prevailing Jim Crow laws quickly spread.

In Nashville, for example, James Lawson had been training young students such as John Robert Lewis and Diane Nash in the art of nonviolence.

Here is how Lewis recalled the lessons he learned in basement sessions held at Clark Memorial Church in Nashville.

He recalled, it changed my life forever, set me on a path committed to the way of peace to the way of love, and I have not looked back since.

We studied the whole idea of passive resistance. We studied the way to love.

That if someone beat you or spit on you or poured hot water or hot coffee on you, you looked straight ahead and never ever dreamed of hitting that person back or being violent toward that person.

And we accepted it, most of us accepted it as a way of life, as a way of living, made us much better human beings.

We had what we called role playing or what some people would call social drama, someone pretending that they were beating you or hitting you.

And there were young people who would light a cigarette and then blow smoke in the faces of and the eyes of some of those people, preparing them for whatever could happen or might happen.

It was the way we had been trained that you absorb the hitting, the beating, but you don't come out of what happened being bitter or hostile or hating or not loving that person.

You see the individual as your friend, as your sister, as your brother. Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.

If you start hating people, you have to decide who you're going to hate tomorrow. Who are you going to hate next week?

Just love everybody. And on one occasion I heard Dr. King say, just love the hell out of everybody. It's the better way, it's the best way.

So said John Lewis.

And it was the way of Greensboro and soon of Nashville and God willing, one day of America.

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