February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four

On February 1, 1960, four students from the all-black North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College entered the downtown Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked to be served at the lunch counter, refusing to leave after being denied. The participants in the sit-in grew to 23 by the second day, 66 by the third day, 100 by the fourth day, and 1,000 by the fifth day, and within two months similar sit-ins had occurred in fifty-four cities and nine different states. As the great drama unfolded, the students began to discover the power of direct action protest: as one protester put it, “that dime store was the birthplace of a whirlwind.”

February One is the dramatic story of the Greensboro sit-ins that reenergized the fledgling civil rights movement of the 1960s. Based largely on firsthand accounts and rare archival footage, this documentary recounts how four determined young black men conceived and initiated a direct response to the existing segregation laws that served as a catalyst for the wave of nonviolent protests that swept across the South and the nation throughout the 1960s. Interviews with the four—Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Joseph McNeil—are clearly the heart and soul of the documentary, but they are far from being the only players. As the documentary makes clear, this protest brought out the worst and the best in people of both races, from the black Wool-worth's employee who criticized the four students for “making trouble” to the white racist element that began to heckle and harass the protesters, who nonetheless remained true to nonviolence. At the other end of the spectrum were Dr. Warmouth Gibbs, president of North Carolina A&T, who, despite pressure from white authorities to order a halt to the protests, told the students to follow their consciences and do what they thought was right, and the elderly white woman who told Franklin McCain that she was “disappointed” in them because they had taken so long to act. The documentary concludes by examining the later careers of the Greensboro Four and the way their extraordinary courage affected their lives in both positive and negative ways. David Richmond's story is the most poignant part of the documentary. Considered by many to be the gentlest of the four, he was the only one who remained in Greensboro following the sit-ins, and he paid a price for it. Vilified as a “radical,” blacklisted by local employers, his life threatened, he spent his last days working as a janitor in a nursing home. The emotional toll, along with two failed marriages, led to alcohol abuse. He died in 1990 at the age of forty-nine, and the film is dedicated to his memory.

February One succeeds admirably in explaining why the Greensboro sit-ins are one of the most important chapters in the history of the civil rights movement. It will appeal to a wide audience and will be useful as a teaching tool because, as is true of histories of all people who yearn for freedom, the story of the Greensboro Four is timeless. Franklin McCain perhaps summed it up best: “We didn't go down to Woolworth's to change the world. All we wanted was manhood and dignity.”