VP Harris sits at counter where Greensboro Four made history

<p>Vice President Kamala Harris took a detour while visiting North Carolina on Monday <a href="https://twitter.com/people4kam/status/1384244407159836676">to sit at the same lunch counter</a> where four Black college students known as the Greensboro Four conducted a peaceful sit-in 61 years ago that became defining moment in the civil rights movement.</p>
<p>Harris, who was in North Carolina to plug President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, made the unscheduled visit to the International Civil Rights Center &amp; Museum in Greensboro. The museum contains the “whites only” Woolworth’s counter where students Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.) and David Richmond staged their historic sit-in on Feb. 1, 1960.</p>
<p>Harris, the first female Black vice president, took a moment to sit at a section of the original Woolworth’s counter. </p>
<p>The Greensboro Four were refused service and declined to give up their seats even as the store manager and police urged them to move on. </p>
<p>The manager eventually closed the store early instead of serving the four men. The protest was not the first lunch counter sit-in, but garnered national attention and spurred dozens more sit-ins throughout the country. Another section of the original lunch counter is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.</p>
<p>Harris’ visit came on the same day that a jury in Minneapolis began deliberating in the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd, a Black man whose death has become a touchstone in the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for policing reform.</p>
<p>Harris has paid tribute to the Greensboro Four before. In a 2019 posting on Twitter, Harris said that the four men — students at the North Carolina A&amp;T State University — showed “courage, strength, and refusal to accept injustice" and brought the nation "a step closer to who we can and should be.”</p>
<p>Harris also checked out another display at the museum: the bus seat that civil rights icon Rosa Parks refused to give up to a white man in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. That spurred a bus boycott led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and eventually culminated with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional.</p>