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Three white college students in bobby socks and long skirts pushed their way through the hostile crowd up to the segregated lunch counter. Three men, who had been occupying seats to keep black protesters away from the counter, stood up to offer the women their seats.

It was Feb. 4, 1960, the fourth day of the Woolworth sit-ins.

“When we sat down, we simply said to the waitress when she asked for our order, 'I think there are other people here ahead of us,’” recalled Ann Dearsley-Vernon, 71, one of the three Woman’s College (now UNCG) students.

That unleashed “nigger lover” and the other insults aimed at the young women, as those around them realized they had been duped.

But those women also stepped into history.

The four young black men who later became known as the Greensboro Four were honor students who had been taught the Bill of Rights and Constitution since grade school. They knew there would be resistance as they put those principles to the test.

The opening of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum on Feb. 1 will be a tribute to Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.) and the late David Richmond.

It is also a tribute to those unsung heroes such as Dearsley-Vernon, who fortified the actions of the Greensboro Four, giving life to a movement that eventually would end legalized racism across the South.

* * *

Talking over blueberry muffins, students Ann Dearsley, Jeannie Seaman and Marilyn Lott became outraged over the idea that someone couldn’t sit down and order a cup of coffee because of the color of their skin.

“We just read it in the newspaper one morning, and by mid-afternoon or early afternoon, we arrived,” said Dearsley-Vernon, who had grown up in London and later in Raleigh.

Dearsley-Vernon did come across a familiar face after taking her seat. She and the daughter of store manager Clarence “Curly” Harris had been friends when his family previously lived in Raleigh.

“He came up to the counter and told me to go back to campus, and I told him I couldn’t do that,” Dearsley-Vernon said.

The girls ordered nothing. The waitress backed away.

An arts major, Dearsley-Vernon began sketching faces in the crowd on her lined notebook paper — even as, at one point, someone pressed a knife against the back of her Woman’s College jacket.

The young women stayed until closing time but did not come back again.

“It sounded so brave, but I didn’t have the courage that so many other people had,” said Dearsley-Vernon, the retired director of education at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va.. There, she was able to take the Greensboro experience, and using an iconic collection of civil rights photographs, turn it into programs for tens of thousands of students.

“It’s almost embarrassing to talk about what we did,” said Dearsley-Vernon, who plans to visit the new civil rights museum in April during her class reunion. “It was so tiny and so spontaneous.”

But to the four black college students at the center of a hostile crowd, the three women were encouraging, McCain recalled 50 years later.

“At the time, the thought was — the people who were going to support you were going to look like you,” McCain said. “She did much more than she thought and much more than she ever gave herself credit for.”

As the women stood up for their principles, there was still the matter of getting back to campus once the store closed.

Realizing their predicament, a group of young black men — who Dearsley-Vernon would come to learn were members of the N.C. A&T football team — joined hands around them and escorted the three past the angry crowd.

The human wall remained intact as they waited for a cab — and recited “The Lord’s Prayer” in unison for moral strength.

That would not be the worst of it.

Back at school, the women were chastised by school officials and told they would have to leave. That changed after parents intervened, but Dearsley-Vernon didn’t get to walk across the stage to receive her diploma. Still, she doesn’t regret being guided by her convictions that day.

“Of many actions in my life,” she said, “this is one I would do again.”

* * *

Edward Lee McAdoo remembers being spit upon and threatened.

McAdoo’s job was to drive reinforcements to the lunch counter demonstration in his ’57 Galaxie convertible when the protesters thinned.

“David said, 'Cause, we’ve got to keep those chairs filled,’” McAdoo said, referring to his cousin, David Richmond. When McAdoo wasn’t giving rides, he sat alongside the others at the counter. Beginning the second day of the protest, he kept coming back.

“He dropped everything and became our main supporter,’’ Jibreel Khazan said of the former Marine. “He was very upset that he came home from service and was treated like a second-class citizen.”

McAdoo had to be extra careful as he rumbled back and forth downtown.

“I knew I couldn’t get arrested because I had a job to do,” McAdoo, now 74, recalled. “I had to get the people there. When the police tried to make an arrest, I’d move back in the crowd.”

He sympathized with those black people who worked in the Woolworth store, who sometimes wouldn’t even make eye contact.

“When we were up there, they wouldn’t say nothing,” McAdoo said. “They were scared to lose their jobs. They would sometimes come by and smile at us. We knew they were in a tough position.”

That summer, demonstrators succeeded in getting the dime store to open its lunch counter to everyone — and McAdoo was there as the black counter workers were the first to be served.

By 1962, when McAdoo had been hired by the U.S. Postal Service, the movement was two years strong but aimed at other segregated restaurants, movie theaters and buses.

McAdoo, who had attended A&T on the G.I. Bill before, went back to school 13 years later, earning a degree in history and a master’s in guidance-counselor education. He would marry Georgia Jones, settle in Greensboro and raise a family of six children.

“I don’t feel like I did anything extra,” McAdoo said. “I don’t feel like a hero. I do feel good about what I did.”

* * *

There since the second day, Lewis Brandon III is the guy being shoved in the television footage of a mob about to converge on protesters.

“There were a lot of 'fifth men,’ ” Brandon said, referring to people who helped the Greensboro Four keep the protest going.

But for him, that responsibility included walking the neighborhoods surrounding A&T to sell tickets to a benefit concert by Don Shirley, a famous pianist, who agreed to do a fundraiser to keep bailing demonstrators out of jail. Later, it would include helping coordinate the transition of the movement to Dudley High School students, who would be there when the college kids left for the summer. And, reactivating the campus NAACP chapter.

“Lewis Brandon is the guy you want in the fifth position if you are going to war,” McNeil said of the role Brandon played.

Brandon, like the four students who went to Woolworth the first day, was a thinker.

“I wasn’t someone who was necessarily out front,” said Brandon, 70, a former scientist and science teacher. “I worked to draw people to the movement — whatever was necessary to make the thing successful.”

He had grown up in Asheville — a town with its divisiveness but also togetherness.

A high school athlete and former semi-pro baseball player, Brandon remembers playing a white team at a public ball field in Asheville that the two teams had rented, and hearing the person in charge of the park say they wouldn’t stand for blacks and whites playing together.

“The irony of it was at that time Jackie Robinson was playing with the Dodgers, and the Negro leagues were already breaking up,’’ Brandon said. “We just took to the field and played.”

As a freshman at A&T, he would discover the Market Street underpass in Greensboro — still intact today — that separated flourishing white Greensboro from flourishing black Greensboro. By the time he got to college in 1957, students from A&T already had a history of challenging and confronting the status quo — and “black Greensboro” was behind them.

“You don’t hear (funeral home owner) Goldie Hargett’s name — when the 45 students got arrested (on April 21), she and Dr. B.W. Barnes, a dentist, came down immediately to bail the students out,” said Brandon, who was one of the arrested students.

Numerous others worked quietly in the background — and Brandon easily rattles off several dozen names and what they did. He is more humble about his own role in organizing groups and holding protests together — such as reactivating the NAACP chapter on campus.

He is like many of those nameless faces who helped to change attitudes and practices in Greensboro and elsewhere in the country, where Jim Crow laws were slowly being dismantled.

The Woolworth protests “led us to other things to do — like voter registration, talking at churches, building support for campaigns,” said Brandon, who became the first recipient of N.C. A&T’s Medal for Human Rights, given to those who try to correct social injustices. He would go on to receive a degree in biology in 1963 and a master’s degree in education in 1968 from A&T.

“I just see myself as a contributor,” Brandon said.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com