There was a time when Joseph McNeil was heading toward a life of segregation. Separate bathrooms, beaches, theaters, schools, elevators, cemeteries. Separate was what he knew.
"I had experienced that, my parents had experienced that, their parents had experienced that," McNeil said in 2014. "And in all likelihood, my off-spring, my children, would have faced the same issues."
McNeil, and his three fellow students at North Carolina A&T, played an enormous role in heading off that "life of segregation" when they led a sit-in at the Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960.
According to his family, McNeil passed away Wednesday. He was 83 years old.
Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.) is now the only surviving member of the Greensboro Four. David Richmond passed away in 1990 and Franklin McCain in 2014.
Joseph Alfred McNeil was born March 25, 1942, in Wilmington. He spent his childhood in the port city and graduated from Williston Senior High School. He came from a comfortable middle-class family and did well enough to earn a full scholarship to A&T. There, he quickly earned the adoration of Khazan.
"One reason I liked being his roommate was I liked listening to him. He was the type of person – he quoted Aristotle, Plato," said Khazan.
Khazan also said his friend had a great sense of fashion.
"He was a sharp dresser who wore Italian clothes. Italian shoes and everything. I said, 'Can I borrow a sweater for the weekend?' I knew if I wore his sweater that maybe the magic will come off on me," said Khazan.
After his first semester at A&T, McNeil spent the holidays with family in New York City. He returned to Greensboro on a Greyhound bus following winter break. As he traveled farther south, he noticed the attitude toward him changed. In Richmond, McNeil was denied service at a lunch counter.
"Keep going through day-to-day life and getting these prompts – the denial of service at the bus station and somebody making an offhanded racial remark and it just never ended," McNeil recalled.
When McNeil returned to the A&T campus, he found friends in his dorm who were equally frustrated. There were four defiant, brave, fed-up teenagers who hoped to break a cycle of separation. They devised a plan on January 31, 1960. It was fraught with uncertainty.
"Anxious would be apropos for me," he said. "I wanted to get going, get it over with."
The four men walked into the Woolworths in downtown Greensboro on February 1, sat down and asked to be served. They were not.
Franklin McCain was next to McNeil. The other two men – Khazan and Richmond – were a few feet away.
As the men sat, a police officer walked back and forth with a nightstick in his hand. Many white patrons glared, but it never turned violent. And when the store closed a few hours later, the four young men returned to campus, hungry and without any idea of what they had just started.
"It was transformative," says Duke University emeritus history professor William Chafe, a renowned expert on the Civil Rights. "It began the entire thing."
Up until the Woolworth sit in, Chafe says the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott amounted to the biggest moment in the Civil Rights Era.
"But it was one thing not to get on a bus," Chafe says. "It's another thing to sit down at a restaurant or in a theater and demand equal treatment. That is an action that is very dynamic and assertive, as opposed to being a passive boycott. I'm not discrediting all those people in Montgomery, but it's very different to put your life at risk by sitting down at a lunch counter than it is to just simply not get on the bus."
The sit-in movement spread quickly. The four men were joined by 20 others the next day, and 300 turned out by the end of the week. Sit-ins began in Winston-Salem, Durham, Asheville and Wilmington, then like a spiderweb, encompassing the southeast, with sit-ins taking place from Richmond to St. Louis and Florida to Nashville.
It was there, in the capital of Tennessee, where the largest demonstrations took place. Hundreds of people participated, and Nashville lunch counters were the first in the south to be desegregated.
The Greensboro Woolworths desegregated, six months after the first sit in.
"It is the most important social movement in all of American history," says Chafe. "And it transforms the country."
The four freshmen from Greensboro were the spark for it all. McNeil went on to graduate from A&T in 1963, with a degree in engineering and physics. He then went on to a career in the Air Force, flying combat missions over Vietnam.
He spent more than 20 years in the service, six as an officer, the rest in Air Force Reserves, before retiring as a major general.
McNeil settled in New York and had five children with his wife.
"I think that in retrospect, they don't have the kind of appreciation of who they were as individual personalities that we might have, for example of John Lewis," says Chafe.
McNeil and the other members of the Greensboro Four had their seminal moment before turning 20 and have been celebrated ever since. Their legacies are enshrined with a statue outside of A&T's Scott Hall, where they discussed the Woolworths plan as freshmen. And in 2010, 50 years to the day after the sudden movement began, a museum opened in downtown Greensboro, where the lunch counter once stood.
"It made me very proud as an individual have fought for the cause and to continue to do so," remembered McNeil in 2014. "It made me a better person. It taught me that sometimes difficult things may take a little longer, but if they're worthwhile doing, you want to hang in there and see it through."
