Joseph McNeil, Young Spark in a Civil Rights Battle, Dies at 83

U.S.|Joseph McNeil, Young Spark in a Civil Rights Battle, Dies at 83

Joseph McNeil, who jolted the civil rights movement with a surge of youth activism when he and three other freshmen from a historically Black college held a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. — a nonviolent protest that motivated students across the nation to rally, march and picket — died on Thursday in a hospice in Port Jefferson, N.Y. on Long Island. He was 83.

His wife, Ina McNeil, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.

On the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1960, Mr. McNeil and three classmates from what is now North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro approached the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s, sat on the turquoise- and salmon-colored vinyl seats and nervously ordered coffee.

Mr. McNeil said that he and his friends — Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond — wanted to provoke a confrontation and, they hoped, force an immediate change in policy at the five-and-dime chain store. Woolworth’s allowed Black people to shop at the store for school supplies and other items, and to use the lunch counter’s carryout section. They were prohibited from using seats at the counter and being waited on.

“What we did, we thought was the right thing to do to clear up a wrong,” Mr. McNeil later told the Long Island newspaper Newsday, explaining that they had grown up with a sense of worth that made them increasingly fed up with Jim Crow discrimination and eager to be treated with basic decency and respect.