Episode #011: Prelude to May I Take Your Order

Sit-ins became a prominent part of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, with the most famous occurring in Greensboro, North Carolina. But as a form of protest, it was first used in 1939 by a lawyer named Samuel Wilbert Tucker.

Libraries in Alexandria, Virginia refused to issue library cards to colored citizens and Mr. Tucker used a sit-in to mount a legal challenge to that practice. In early 1960, Franklin McCain was one of the four North Carolina A&T College students who staged a sit-in at the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro as a way to do something about the condition of segregation.

Their efforts ultimately led to similar events across the south - in nine states and fifty-four cities. This episode features reflections by McCain on what it was like to be a part of The Greensboro Four and pays tribute to a hidden legal figure whose early twentieth-century insight gave a later generation the tool that would produce groundbreaking civil rights legislation. 

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