There isn’t a monument yet, although McNeil was featured speaker at the 50th reunion of his Williston High School class in 2009. Go to Greensboro, however, and you’ll find a 10-foot  statue of McNeil as one of the “Greensboro Four,” who launched the sit-in movement for civil rights on Feb. 1, 1960.

McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr. (who later changed his name to Jibreel Khazan), Franklin Eugene McCain and David Leinall Richmond were freshmen at N.C. A&T State University, an historically black campus of the state university system in Greensboro. After long discussions in their dormitory, the four decided to protest at the F.W. Woolworth store at 301 N. Elm St., Greensboro, which attracted much business from the local black community buf wouldnot serve black customers at its lunch counter.

At about 4 p.m. p.m. on Feb. 1, the four entered the store, bought a few items, then proceeded to sit at the lunch counter and order coffee. When a waitress refused to serve them, the four remained in their seats and stayed there until closing time at 5:30 p.m.

The four returned the next day, and the next, gradually joined by other A&T students and some sympathetic white students from Women’s College (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). By Feb. 6, more than 500 students jammed the Woolworth and the nearby S.H. Kress store in downtown Greensboro and gathered on nearby streets. By Feb. 11, similar “sit-ins” were spreading to High Point and other towns in North Carolina. Within two months, the sit-in movement had expanded to more than 50 cities in nine states including Atlanta and Nashville. On July 25, 1960, the Greensboro Woolworth’s management finally agreed to integrate its lunch counter; four black employees of the store were the first to be served.

Born in 1942 in Wilmington, Joseph Alfred McNeil (known as “Jo-Jo” to his friends) grew up in the city and graduated from Williston High School in 1959. In his 2009 address to his old classmates, McNeil recalled that he and friends had discussed Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ideas about non-violent protest even in high school, and that he and friends had considered launching a sit-down protest against a local Pepsi-Cola plant. After graduation, he was admitted to N.C. A&T on a full scholarship.

McNeil went on to graduate from N.C. A&T in 1963 with a degree in engineering physics. An ROTC student, he was immediately commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, serving as an aircraft navigator off the Vietnamese coast. After six years’ active duty, he entered the Air Force Reserve, retiring as a major general in 2000. He then joined the Federal Aviation Administration; before his retirement from the agency, he spent 15 years as head of the Flight Standards Division of the FAA’s Eastern Region in Jamaica, N.Y.

McNeil was modest about his role in the Greensboro sit-ins: “One person could not have done this by himself,” he told reporters. Nevertheless, the honors flooded in. He and the rest of the Greensboro Four received honorary doctorates from their alma mater in 1994. He also received an honorary docatorate from St. John’s University in 1998. On Feb. 1, 2002, the statue of McNeil, Khazan, McCain and Richmond, by A&T art professor James Barnhill, was unveiled in front of the university’s Dudley Memorial Building. (The building is named for another Wilmington native, James Benson Dudley, who had been president of the school from 1896 to 1925.)

The former Woolworth store in Greensboro now houses the  International Civil Rights Center and Museum, where the lunch ounter and its seats are preserved as they were in Feburary 1960.

For a video of a 2009 Star-News interview with Joseph McNeil,  click here.

Date posted: January 29, 2010

User-contributed question by:
William Jordan