The Greensboro sit-ins opened with four Black students requesting coffee at a whites-only counter

Evidence

The bus ran fine today and this morning was just like most mornings. I walked out front to clean off the counter. I tried not to watch the parade of mostly white people carrying bags full of everything I couldn’t afford. When four young colored men in trench coats walked in through the glass doors, I nodded hello, thinking they must be looking for a job, but before I could guess again each one stopped right below the giant sign that said WHITES ONLY and one by one they sat down at the counter and each one set what looked like a briefcase on the floor next to his legs, which was when I felt all the air in the diner evaporate. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 988

Categorization

• XREF: Eyewitness fiction within the 1619 Project frames the sit-in from a fellow Black worker’s terrified perspective; resonates with documentary fiction technique in A Midwife’s Tale’s rendering of ordinary lives amid historic events.