With the Greensboro sit-in, Joseph McNeil helped spark a movement

They were four friends, all freshmen at a historically Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. And when they sat down at a segregated lunch counter on Feb. 1, 1960, they had no idea whether they’d be harassed, beaten, sent to jail or kicked out of school.

“What we did, we thought was the right thing to do to clear up a wrong,” Joseph McNeil, the group’s youngest member, told an interviewer decades later. “We weren’t thinking about making history.”