- Make-shift jails, like this hospital that formerly housed polio patients, imprisoned sit-in demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, during May 1963. In Greensboro, crowds of more than 2,000 marched through the city's streets, braving threats of arrest as they demanded school and public desegregation and equal opportunity in employment. At the Page 393 →height of the protests, local police detained as many as 1,400, most of them students. Sit-ins first appeared in Greensboro, when four African American college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter to eat. Refused service, they remained seated to protest the segregation of public accommodations. In the months and years that followed, civil rights activists across the South used the sit-in as an effective nonviolent direct action tactic to dramatize the inequities of segregation.
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