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GREENSBORO - Fifty years ago, African Americans in Greensboro and across the South lived in a separate, but not necessarily equal, society.

On Feb. 1, 1960, that started to change. That day, the wall of segregation that divided blacks and whites began to crumble.

It happened on South Elm Street in Greensboro.

About 4:30 p.m., four freshmen from what is now N.C. A&T sat down at the whites-only lunch counter at the F.W. Woolworth store and asked for service.

When the waitress refused, the students remained seated.

Their act of defiance changed history, set off the sit-in movement that swept the South and paved the way for a series of changes that transformed American society.

“The moments they sat in those chairs have had a lasting impact on our nation,” President Barack Obama said in an e-mail to the News & Record. “The lessons taught at that five-and-dime challenged us to consider who we are as a nation and what kind of future we want to build for our children.”

Some have compared the sit-ins to the Boston Tea Party in their impact, calling the protests the most important event in the civil rights movement and Greensboro’s most significant moment.

“The sit-ins in this city changed the course of history — not just in civil rights — but the country in general,” said Bamidele Demerson, curator and director of programs at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which will open today in the old Woolworth building. “Those four young men helped change the country forever.”

Historians, sociologists and civil rights leaders say the sit-ins:

• Revitalized a flagging civil rights movement.

Before 1960, African American leaders had relied primarily on lawsuits to dismantle segregation. But the pace had been slow, leaving many, like the four A&T freshmen, frustrated and impatient.

“We’ve talked about it long enough,” Joseph McNeil, one of the students, said the night before the sit-ins began. “Let’s do something.”

McNeil and his friends had come of age during a time of great expectations for young blacks.

In 1954, the NAACP had won a major victory when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools should be desegregated.

But by 1960, with desegregation proceeding at 1 percent per year, most African American children still went to all-black schools.

And the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had failed to develop a successful follow up to the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.

“To many,” actor and activist Brian Jones wrote in the January-February issue of the International Socialist Review, “the 'movement’ seemed all but invisible.”

But thanks to the sit-ins, the civil rights movement suddenly became national news.

Within a year of the first protests, more than 100 cities had desegregated some of their public facilities.

• Opened the door for the mass protests that swept the nation over the next decade.

In addition to the sit-ins, pickets, boycotts and demonstrations sprang up across the South.

Such protests — and the victories they produced — became the central strategy of the movement in the coming years.

Within a year, about 50,000 people had taken part in sit-ins in about 100 cities. In a two-year period, 20,000 people had been arrested. “Jail, no bail” became the students rallying cry.

“We know the rest of the story,” Obama wrote, ticking off some of the events which followed the sit-ins.

In 1961, came the Freedom Rides, in which students protested segregation on interstate buses.

The March on Washington followed in 1963, when 250,000 people heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech.”

Then came the voter registration efforts of 1964, called Freedom Summer, and the march from Montgomery to Selma, Ala., in 1965.

• Placed students in the forefront of the changes that swept the nation.

Across the South, the sit-ins mobilized thousands of black youths and hundreds of white ones and led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in April 1960.

In Greensboro, the sit-ins involved hundreds of students from A&T and Bennett College as well as a few sympathetic whites from Greensboro College, Guilford College and what is now UNCG.

Joseph McNeil and his friends, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond, didn’t invent sit-ins.

The tactic had been around at least since the early 1940s, including one in 1957 at Royal Ice Cream Shop in Durham. But none attracted national attention.

The Greensboro Four, as the initial students became known, latched upon a strategy whose time and place had come.

“(It) lit a flame,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said of the sit-ins. “The whole South was aglow.”

• Showed that sit-ins and economic boycotts by blacks could force white businesses to change segregationist policies.

In his book “Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom,” William H. Chafe reports that Woolworth lost $200,000 during the protests.

The sit-ins and related demonstrations lasted off and on for nearly six months.

Eventually, Woolworth, Kress, Meyer’s Department Store and other businesses gave in to the pressure and quietly agreed to integrate their lunch counters.

On July 25, 1960, when blacks and whites began to eat together downtown, no one protested.

“It meant to black people that segregation could be defeated,” James Farmer, the late civil rights leader, once said of the sit-ins. “With their very bodies, (the students) obstructed the wheels of injustice.”

• Inspired protests that led to desegregation of other institutions.

Across the South, officials at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum say, the sit-ins spawned kneel-ins at segregated churches, sleep-ins at segregated motel lobbies, swim-ins at segregated pools, wade-ins at segregated beaches, read-ins at segregated libraries, play-ins at segregated parks and watch-ins at segregated movie theaters.

• Forced the federal government to respond to racial inequities.

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation which forbade segregation and discrimination in public accommodations and made it illegal for employers to discriminate against minorities.

And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act said that no one could be denied the right to vote based on race.

“These events,” Chafe wrote, “essentially demolished the structure of Jim Crow that had reigned supreme in the South since the 1890s.”

• Moved black adults to take a more visible stand in the fight against segregation.

Some say the students took the lead in the sit-ins because, unlike their parents and teachers, they didn’t have jobs to protect.

In 1963, when African American students sought to desegregate Greensboro’s cafeterias and movie theaters, adults joined the successful effort.

“Adults would not have stepped forward in 1963 if students had not stepped forward in 1960,” said Bill Link, a former professor of history at UNCG, who now teaches at the University of Florida. “Adults were emboldened by student action. They gained courage from it, really.”

• Fostered radical ambitions among some of its participants.

By the mid-1960s, some of the students who had quietly taken part in the sit-ins now chanted black power salutes.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, called “Snick,” became the civil rights movement’s most radical arm.

It inspired the white New Left and other social movements — such as the campaigns against poverty and the war in Vietnam — that sprang up later in the ’60s.

“But America’s economic system and its foreign policy objectives were more tenacious evils, and unlike segregation, did not crumble at their touch,” Brian Jones wrote in the January-February International Socialist Review. “Thus, many who started out as students trying to win over America with Christian love ended up as professional revolutionaries trying to build parties that could overthrow it.”

• Shocked the South’s white leadership.

Before Feb. 1, 1960, most white leaders espoused a similar philosophy: “Our Negroes are happy.”

The sit-ins sent a different message.

Former Greensboro Mayor Jim Melvin called the sit-ins “a real early wake-up call that things were not right.”

In most cities, historians say, elected officials tried to keep the demonstrations under control.

But the sheer numbers of protesters, the economic impact of the boycotts and the national media attention forced them to respond.

• Caused segregationists to step up their resistance.

In Greensboro, as more students joined the sit-ins, Klansmen and white youth showed up to heckle them.

One day, Woolworth closed because of a bomb scare.

In Nashville, Tenn., white students attacked the sit-in students, yanking them off the stools and beating them.

Police arrested the black students.

People who watched such scenes on television or saw pictures of the attacks in national newspapers noted the differences.

It took Greensboro’s white population nearly 20 years to embrace the sit-ins. That fact was symbolized in 1980 by the erection of a state historical marker near the intersection of North Elm and Friendly Avenue commemorating the event.

“A lot of positive work had been done in the community,” said Gayle Fripp, the Guilford County historian. “People had begun to look on the progress of civil rights as a positive thing.”

But people outside Greensboro still don’t automatically associate the sit-ins with the Gate City.

A recent answer on the game show Jeopardy proves that.

Said host Alex Trebek, “A key moment in the civil rights movement was a sit-in protest after four black students were refused service at an all-white F.W. Woolworth lunch counter in this North Carolina city.”

Instead of asking, “What is Greensboro?” the three contestants responded with blank stares.

“None of those bright people knew where it happened,” Fripp said. “It might be that the museum will change that.”

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com.