The NAACP assisted the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black labor organization of its day. In the 1940s, the United Auto Workers, with NAACP encouragement, made overtures to black workers. The NAACP's successful fight against the Democratic white primary in the South was more than a bid for inclusion; it was a stiff challenge to what was in fact a regional one-party dictatorship. Recognizing the interdependence of domestic and foreign affairs, the NAACP's program in the 1920s and 1930s promoted solidarity with Haitians who were trying to end the American military occupation and with colonized blacks elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Africa. African Americans' support for WWII and the battle against the Master Race ideology abroad was matched by equal determination to eradicate it in America, too. In the post-war years blacks supported the decolonization of Africa and Asia." 5.
These events led up to the large Civil Rights Movement that most people know and are taught about.
Greensboro, North Carolina was a city that was involved with many events during the Civil Rights Movement. The main event was the Greensboro Sit-in at the Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960. The first sit-in was led by four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technology College.6 Their names were Ezell Blair, Jr, David Rich, Franklin McClain, and Joseph McNeil.7 The four young men were freshman at the college. On February 1, 1960, the young men travelled to the Woolworth's store to purchase supplies, then occupied the lunch counter on the white side.8 When they were denied service, they continued to sit at the lunch counter. Twenty-five students sat in Woolworth's during the lunch hour on February 2, 1960, and forty-five students returned the next day. 9.
The men were interviewed and some of their statements were put into the local newspapers. "Blair declared, 'many of our adults have been complacent and fearful and it is time for someone to wake up and change the situation and we decided to start here.