Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond were freshmen at North Carolina A&T University in the fall of 1959. Joseph McNeil went to New York for the holidays. On his way back they refused to serve him at the Greyhound bus station in Greensboro. After telling his group about the unacceptable incident, they decided to take action. On February 1st, 1960 they went to the F.W Woolworth store and sat at the “whites only” lunch counter. They were denied service and were asked to leave, but they ignored and kept sitting there until the shop closed. The next day, they came back with more people. Each day more and more people joined the “sit-in” until more than 70,000 people had participated by August 1961. Since it’s within the privacy of the students, the college administrators could not control their actions. Other administrators debated for as long as 2 hours to leave the lunch counters closed for an amount of time. In total, over 55 cities and 18 states had followed the sit-in movement. This also caused people to send the Advisory Committee 2,000 citizen letters, 78 percent regarding to integrate the lunch counters. This whole time, the F.W Woolworth store was trying to stop the protest from happening in their store, until the Advisory Committee and the Chairman Zane informed him to that all well-dressed well-behaved people will be served, black or white. …show more content…
On June 21, 1964 they were on their way to investigate on a black church because they had been working to register black voters in Mississippi, until they were murdered near Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi. First, they were arrested for trump-up charges, then they were given to the Ku Klux Klan. They were the ones who beat and murdered them. But, it turns out the court proved to find that there was some sort of alliance for the kill between the Neshoba County’s law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan. In October 1964 the FBI arrested up to 18 men who were related to the killing, and were supposed to serve 3 to 10 years in jail but only served six. None was charged for the murder. The case was closed until 1999, where it had reopened because they discovered that a former Ku Klux Klan, Sam Bower was ordered to do the killing of Michael Shwerner in 1964. Turns out, a police officer by the name of Edgar Ray Killen was in charge of the murder of three. Only found four decades later on January 7, 2005 Killen was charged 60 years in prison, which is a lesser charge than what it should have been. Bower was sentenced life in prison. The 18 men that were arrested in 1967, only 7 remained, and were released.