Sitting Down at the Counter
The friends felt the invisible line of separation between the shopping area open to everyone and the dining area where black Americans were forbidden from taking a seat. They knew as everyone in the South did that stepping past that line could get them arrested, beaten or, even killed.
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Lieutenant Drue H. Lackey in Alabama on December 1st, 1955. Photo by Everett Collection / Shutterstock
The four of them were all the age that Emmett Till, who was tortured and murdered five years earlier in Mississippi, would have been. They sat down at the counter. After a few moments, people started to notice what was going on. Just as the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, discovered their power after Rosa Parks’ arrest in 1955, the Greensboro Four were about to create their own change.