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Feb. 1 gets the pomp and circumstance as the day in 1960 that four black N.C. A&T students sat down at the segregated F.W. Woolworth lunch counter and tried to order, sparking sit-ins across the country.

But it was 50 years ago today, July 25, that African Americans were finally served at Woolworth and other restaurants in downtown Greensboro.

“February 1 stands out above any other date because without February 1, there wouldn’t have been July 25,” Franklin McCain, 69, who was one of the students, said last week. “Also, it didn’t take near the daring nor the courage to do July 25. But in terms of reverence, I have a lot of reverence for July 25 because it represents the courage, the faith and the sacrifice of a lot of people.”

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Geneva Tisdale remembers climbing atop a seat at the counter, and nervously eating the egg sandwich she wished she could gobble down more quickly so she could get back to work behind the counter.

She didn’t want her front-row seat to history. Day in and day out, there had been demonstrations in front of the store protesting the Jim Crow laws.

“I was trying to get up from there before anything happened,” the now 78-year-old Tisdale said recently.

Management, in ceding to months of protests and lost revenue, wanted some control over the situation. They chose Tisdale and three other black employees to be the first African Americans served there. The decision is being celebrated today with an afternoon of free events connected to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which opened in the renovated Woolworth building on Feb. 1.

“You can’t tell everything,” Tisdale said of the whispering that went on both behind the counter and as people began to notice.

“Everybody had to get used to these new roles.”

By the time the protesters noticed and rushed in, the shy young woman had wiped her mouth and crumpled up her napkin.

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McCain, who was a freshman when he helped to jump-start the movement at Woolworth, had used $200 from his summer job to fly from northern Virginia back to Greensboro that day.

Having been tipped off a few days earlier that it would happen at the downtown lunch counters July 25, he was settling in at Meyer’s Department Store nearby as Tisdale struggled with her sandwich at the Woolworth counter.

When McCain arrived back in Greensboro, he had been asked by those who had kept the marches and boycotts going to wait at Meyer’s, whose lunch counter was also a target.

“Nobody wanted to be first and nobody wanted to do it alone,” McCain said of the  stores.

He ate that day at Meyer’s.

“Quite honestly, I gave a nice prayer of thanks and thanksgiving, and the meal itself was rather anticlimactic,” McCain said of the food, which he can’t recall. “It was nonmemorable.”

He later walked past Woolworth, where he, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair (now Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond had launched a movement that would spread across the South.

“I passed there a couple of times to see black folks eating,” McCain said of July 25, 1960. “It was a day of confirmation, more than anything else. We knew it would happen. We just didn’t know when.”

What may be surprising is that he’s never had a full meal in Woolworth.

“Because of the celebrations, I always ended up with just a little bit of coffee and a little bit of egg,” McCain joked.

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