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GREENSBORO — Linda Brown sat at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter on that day in the spring of 1960 with a book in her hand, but not really reading.

Tensions were high. Weeks earlier, four N.C. A&T students had sat at that counter, sparking a nationwide movement.

Brown, with other Bennett College students on either side , watched as a young white waitress walked by holding a long, flat tray of knives.

“She was so nervous that you could hear the knives shaking,” said Brown, who will share her memories of the sit-ins during a panel discussion on the Bennett campus next week.

“It was ... real clear to me that she was as frightened as we were — for her own reasons,” Brown said.

“This was highly unusual. It was unnerving to people. They didn’t know what we might do, and we didn’t know what they might do.”

When Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan ) got up from the Woolworth counter, the ladies of Bennett College sat down. From helping to plan the event that would grasp the nation’s attention to holding follow-up sit-ins and protests outside the Woolworth store to keep the momentum going, the faculty, staff and students of Bennett College were front and center during this critical point in the civil rights movement, alumnae said.

On Monday , Bennett is hosting “A Retrospective on Bennett Belle Leadership in the 1960s Sit-In Movement” as part of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins and the opening of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.

Alumnae will share perspectives on Bennett’s role in the Feb. 1, 1960, sit-in and the events that followed in the struggle to desegregate the city.

“We were in it together from the beginning, and we were in it together until the end,” said Brown, the Willa B. Player Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Bennett College for Woman, a historically African American school.

“At one point, in the three, four years that went by ... there were over 250 Bennett women in jail. And so the large majority of Bennett women were participants and helped carry that movement,” she said, “and I think that is one of the things that we would like to get corrected.”

Bennett was then, as it is now, a close-knit group of several hundred female students, many of whom followed in the footsteps of their mothers and sisters in attending the college.

Some, like Brown, were raised to fight against injustice. Her father was an executive with the National Urban League, and conversations about the country’s racial climate were common at the dinner table in her hometown of Akron, Ohio.

“So it was a very natural thing for me to respond when I knew they were looking for people to go downtown and sit in,” she said. “That was what we did in my family.”

For those who knew little about activism, that would change once they stepped on campus. Bennett women have a history of standing up for what they believe . It dates back to the 1930s when students protested at the movie theaters to show their displeasure over the portrayal of black women in films, said Bennett Provost Esther Terry.

“When I came here, that was the tradition I entered,” said Terry, a 1961 Bennett graduate who sat with Brown at the Woolworth counter. “A tradition that engaged itself, was a part of and felt proud of the community, and held as our responsibility that we should be a part of the community that did not lower its standards.”

Bennett women found ways other than protesting to fight segregation. They regularly participated in exchange student programs with white women’s colleges, Terry said. Two of the white students who attended Bennett during the 1960s will participate in next week’s discussion.

The Bennett women said they had a dynamic leader who supported them in their efforts. Willa Player was Brown’s aunt and the first female president of the college.

When city leaders urged Player to have her students back off their protests, she refused, going so far as to take homework assignments to those who were in jail.

“Ms. Player had an eye for the symbolic to say, 'I am exactly in accord with what they are doing,’” Terry said. '“It is what they have been taught to do as people who have been endowed with every bit of humanity and human rights and dignity as anybody else.’”

Bennett’s forum will add a little more to a story that’s been told for 50 years now, but Terry doubts those who did not live it will ever know its entirety.

“That time can never be told in the action of four young men,” she said. “The passion that took over, the energy, the pain and the absolute happiness, the fear — all of those things that somehow grabbed the black community — cannot be told.”

Contact Jonnelle Davis at 373-7080 or jonnelle.davis@news-record.com