GREENSBORO, N.C. — More than 65 years later, Charles Bess is one of the few people left who can still describe what it was like to watch the A&T Four sit down at the whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter on Feb. 1, 1960.

Friday afternoon, just a day after the death of Joseph McNeil , one of the Greensboro Four, Bess returned to the counter where history was made. Standing in the same spot where he once worked as a 20-year-old busboy, he reflected on how an ordinary Monday turned into a day that changed the course of the civil rights movement.

“At that time I didn’t know what to think,” he said.

Bess remembers clearly that the four young men weren’t there for a meal.

“When they sat down that day, they wasn’t hungry, they wasn’t hungry for food, they were hungry for change,” he said.

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