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On a college campus of several thousand gifted students, the four freshmen gravitated to each other.

The Socrates-quoting quiet guy. The four-letter high school athlete. The Boy Scout with a sense of the dramatic. And the tall, lanky one, with nerves of steel.

Nobody else really got them, they say now. In their dorm rooms at N.C. A&T, they talked studies, sports, girls and the unfairness of Jim Crow laws.

When they decided to challenge the status quo, the young scholars, inseparable since orientation, just had each other.

“The line of demarcation was how deeply you got involved and what you were prepared to do,” says Franklin McCain, one of the students. “It was a number-one priority for us.”

The image and the words of the four young men are immortalized in the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which opens Feb. 1 .

It honors McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond and Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.).

Five decades after the four freshmen took seats at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter and made an imprint on the world, three of them are fathers and grandfathers . The fourth, Richmond, died of lung cancer in 1990 .

Their efforts are widely recognized for reinvigorating the civil rights movement.

None ever again emerged as a leader of that magnitude in the movement, although they remained active, in their own ways, in the fight for social justice.

“I wanted to be a scientist or I wanted to fly airplanes, and so I opted to do that rather than be a professional civil rights worker or minister,” says McNeil, 67 . “I viewed myself as a citizen, someone who cared very deeply about the issues, and I needed to get on with life.”

The two-star major general

Joseph Alfred McNeil quoted not only Socrates but also the poet Langston Hughes in college.

A deep thinker who drew the young men into discussions on civil disobedience that led them to the counter, he liked to talk ideology and concepts and was concerned with life’s “bigger picture, ” McCain recalls.

The Wilmington native later had a role in other demonstrations and causes, but the semester after the sit-ins ended, McNeil, who has a photographic memory, was focused on his books.

“The secret of life,” McNeil says, “is knowing when to take on something difficult and to take something on that might have enormous risks and implications.”

McNeil, who was also in the ROTC program while at A&T, joined the Air Force after graduating with a degree in engineering physics. During six years of active duty, he served as a navigator on tankers refueling other planes off the Vietnamese coast during the Vietnam War.

In 1967, he married the former Ina Brown, an ancestor of Sioux warrior Sitting Bull . Their youngest child, Frank David , is named after McCain and Richmond .

“It was my intense sense of respect for them, who they were and what they accomplished,” he says about the men, including Khazan. “My best friends, really.”

Over the years, he says that watching the student movement in Tiananmen Square and the Polish labor movement under Lech Walesa gave him a sense of pride.

“It was good to be a part of that whole effort and to understand that some small effort on your part may have influenced someone else to do something positive,” says McNeil, who retired as a two-star major general from the Air Force Reserves in 2001 and who also worked as an investment banker.

Some who know McNeil have been surprised to learn that he is a civil rights hero. “People I’ve worked with for many years say, 'Oh, that’s you,’” says McNeil.

He’s proud. He just doesn’t like to talk about himself.

He is a little dismayed by the selfish attitudes he sees today.

“They didn’t come back and say, 'What’s in it for me?’” McNeil says about those who joined the demonstrations in the 1960s. “That’s something we hear a lot of today. People gave of their lives, their time and their money.”

The scholar-athlete

It could have been the realization that no matter what he and his friends from the East White Oak community spent shopping downtown at the Woolworth or Kress stores, they still couldn’t order at the lunch counters.

That might have helped propel David Leinail Richmond on the walk with McNeil, Khazan and McCain.

Now, a life-size sculpture of Richmond and the others stands frozen in time on the grounds of the A&T campus.

But Richmond is gone; he died at the age of 49 .

Unlike the others, he spent most of his life in Greensboro, struggling.

“Greensboro, being Greensboro, kind of punished him,” says Lewis Brandon , a local civil rights historian and an A&T graduate who joined the sit-ins the second day .

Many employers were reluctant to hire him because of his sit-in involvement.

“He was smart and worked hard, but the doors were closed on him,” says Franklin Richmond , his younger brother.

A physics major who wanted to be an engineer his freshman year, he had been named the best math student his first semester at A&T.

“It’s depressing when you look at, say, a Joe McNeil, very successful, at Frank McCain and Ezell Blair,” Richmond once told a writer. “And you look at me. I’m sorta down on myself, really. I should have done better than this.”

Richmond, a young father struggling to balance school and a full-time job, eventually dropped out of college. He got a job counseling disadvantaged youth and adults in 1969 , and it seemed a good fit for him.

“I run across people who tell me, 'He helped me to do this. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t accomplish what I’ve accomplished in life,’” says Franklin Richmond.

But the federal program folded. His first marriage also failed.

Richmond left Greensboro for Franklin , a mountain town in Macon County , where he lived during the 1970s in a trailer. While there, he married again — a marriage that would also fail.

“I lived like a hermit,” he said in 1982. “I grew all my own vegetables. If I wanted meat, I’d shoot a rabbit or a squirrel or catch a trout.”

But Richmond always returned to Greensboro.

He came home in 1981 to live with his parents, who were in bad health. He earned an employee of the year award at the Greensboro nursing home where he worked in maintenance.

And he stayed true to the memories of Feb. 1.

“Even before the big celebrations, David would go to the elementary schools and middle schools and talk to the kids,” Franklin Richmond recalls.

“That was one thing he looked forward to. He was telling them they should be good students, to behave in school and obey their parents, and to use the talent God gave them. He would also tell them about the sit-in movement.”

A creeping dependence on alcohol and cigarettes worsened after his parents died.

But sick as Richmond was toward the end of his struggle with lung cancer, he still managed to also get to the counter every Feb. 1. And at the end, he realized he had everything he was looking for.

“He had stopped measuring himself against other people in the last stages of his life,” says Franklin Richmond. “He was satisfied.”

The entertainer

Ezell Alexander Blair Jr ., now known as Jibreel Khazan , was in Greensboro when the news came that the Woolworth lunch counter was open to black patrons. But it would be three years before he sat down and ordered even a cup of coffee.

“We didn’t want to set the world on fire, we just wanted to eat, just like all other Americans,” says Khazan, who grew up in the Warnersville community with Josephine Boyd , the first black student at Greensboro Senior High School , which later became Grimsley High .

“The real truth of the matter is that Mother’s cooking was better.”

Khazan, now 68 , wanted to take a year off from school after the stress of the sit-ins and of his school work, but his parents, both teachers , wouldn’t hear of it.

“The intensity of what happened to a 17-year-old was more than some people go through in a lifetime,” Khazan says.

He would go on to be elected president of the junior class , the student government association , the campus NAACP and the Greensboro Congress for Racial Equality .

He graduated with a degree in sociology and social studies , and completed a year in law school, but he, like Richmond, found he couldn’t get a job in Greensboro.

“Wherever you make a great change or impact, those in power aren’t going to forget it,” Khazan says. “We were subject to public scrutiny by employers, even by the very people we thought we were helping.”

He moved to New Bedford, Mass. , and found work as a teacher and counselor.

“We made choices, and our choices were based upon each of our individual experiences and our need to fit into the weave of American society,” Khazan says about the lives that followed for the Greensboro Four.

In the summer of 1966, he was invited to Washington by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the most powerful man of color in Congress at that time.

Powell had invited 200 young people to a meeting on black empowerment and he singled out Khazan’s work as a student in Greensboro. “I had tears in my eyes because he caught me off guard,” Khazan recalls.

Khazan was already in the midst of a personal change. He had long been a spiritual person. Outwardly, it has since manifested in his long hair and white robes, the horse-tail scepter he carries and the white tribal-like marking on his forehead. The look is part of his consciousness, he says.

“It makes some people uneasy,” Khazan says. “Every soul that comes on the Earth has a scroll of their life on Earth. Every soul has its own pen. I’m not concerned about anyone else, I’m concerned about the soul inside this mortal body and the life I chose to live.”

In 1968 , he became a member of the New England Islamic Center , and took on the name Jibreel Khazan. He accepts that there are still people who insist on calling him Ezell Blair Jr.

Khazan, now a motivational speaker and storyteller, is known for his natural comedic skills, mixing satire and social commentary.

A former Boy Scout, he still gets teary-eyed when he recites the pledge or when he recalls the lessons taught by teachers and parents — the principles that put him at the counter and continue to guide his life.

“Our teachers told us one day things will change … but right now, boy, you are going to learn your prayers, you are going to recite the Bible, and you are going to respect others, whether you are called a first-class citizen or not,” Khazan says. “We want you to think first-class, we want you to act first-class.”

The chemist

Franklin Eugene McCain came back to Greensboro during his summer break in 1960.

He bought a plane ticket to get to the Woolworth lunch counter on July 25 , when it was first opened to black patrons.

“I went through the ceremonial aspects of having a meal and stuck around for 20 minutes longer, and dashed off to the airport shortly after,” he says. “My thoughts immediately began to focus elsewhere.”

All summer, he had worked a construction job with his father — but he was also picketing at an amusement park in nearby Alexandria, Va., and slipping into the pews at white churches on Sunday mornings.

“At a sanctuary where love and forgiveness is practiced, you wanted to confirm that,” says McCain, who had grown up in Washington, D.C.

Mostly he was ignored, although those already in the pews turned around and made comments to each other.

On a couple of occasions, leaving the sanctuary, he recalls hearing people say, “'We hope you come back and join us.’

“You could assume that some of them were happy to see you go,” he says. “Just outside of Washington, things were just like they were in Greensboro.”

He married his girlfriend, Bettye Davis , a Bennett Belle, and embedded himself in the civic and political life of Charlotte, where he moved after graduating from A&T with degrees in chemistry and biology .

While working his way up to the executive level at a chemical company , he raised three sons and led bond efforts in the community.

“I’ve always felt that this was a very short life,” says McCain, now 67 . “I was brought up not to waste time.”

In 2008 , the man who made history as a freshman was elected chairman of A&T’s board of trustees . Last year, he was elected to the UNC Board of Governors .

He is the first A&T board chairman to already have his likeness on campus.

“The truth is, I rarely think about that statue,” McCain said referring to the bronze statue of the Greensboro Four on the lawn of the Dudley Building .

“It’s probably more humbling than anything else. When someone does mention it, it makes me do a little more self-introspection … I tell myself, 'Make sure you continue to deserve the things that have happened to you.’

“I’d work just as hard if there wasn’t a statue there.”

The Woolworth sit-ins did leave an imprint on him, a voice he cannot get out of his head.

“I don’t know of anyone who made a bigger impression on me … perhaps in my lifetime,” McCain said about the older white woman sitting at the counter who confronted him that first day .

She told him she was proud of him and his friends — and she asked what took them so long.

“That little old lady taught me a lesson for life — don’t you ever feel prejudice toward somebody because of race, station in life or where they come from,” McCain says.

“I can see that little old lady right now. She won’t go away.”

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