February One: The Story of the Greensboro Four

Abstract

On February i, i960, four first-year African American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College walked into the Woolworth's drug store in downtown Greensboro, sat at the whites-only lunch counter, and de manded that they be served on the same basis as white customers. The store's em ployees refused. Determined to resist the injustice of segregation, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond returned the next day. Within a few days, hundreds of other African American students had joined them, and within two months simi lar protests were occurring in fifty-four cities in nine states across the South. By April the Student Nonviolent Coordinat ing Committee (SNCC) had been formed in Raleigh. A new phase of the struggle for racial equality had begun. Relying chiefly on interviews with three of the four students (Richmond died in 1990) and actors dramatizing parts of the story, February One explores the origins and unfolding of the Greensboro sit-ins. The documentary appropriately gives close attention to the process by which four or dinary individuals decided to embark on a plan that would change the nation's history. Blairs father, who had been transformed by his service in World War II and was active