Press Release

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Forty-seven years ago, four brave young men in Greensboro changed the course of American history.

The Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins were a catalyst for the civil rights movement and helped bring about legal equality for all Americans. Thursday, February 1st, those sit-ins were remembered with a Gala Celebration at Greensboro’s Koury Convention Center. Womble Carlyle helped sponsor the event and Jack Hicks, an intellectual property attorney in the firm’s Greensboro office, served as one of the co-chairs of the Gala Celebration.

On Feb. 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina A&T University staged a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. The four were protesting the segregation laws of the day, which excluded African-Americans from using the same public establishments, such as restaurants, as white customers.

The non-violent protests continued for months and eventually, Woolworth’s relented and allowed African-American patrons to dine in the same areas as white customers.

"The Greensboro sit-ins were the spark that ignited sit-ins all over the Southeast," Hicks said. "In North Carolina, there’s really no other location that is associated on such a positive level with the civil rights movement."

Hicks noted that the four young men literally risked their lives, as by 1960, more than 2,000 African-Americans had been murdered for participating in civil rights demonstrations. But while protests in other cities were met with violence and police brutality, the Greensboro sit-ins were peaceful and Hicks said that can be a point of pride for the entire community.

The sit-in movement is credited with helping overturn the "Jim Crow" segregation laws. Today, a portion of the Woolworth’s lunch counter is on display in the Smithsonian Institute.

Hicks also serves as co-chair of the Legal Division of the Campaign to Complete the Dream, the effort to convert the old Woolworth’s building into the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

"It is one of the few museums that is going to be located on the site of the historic event," Hicks said. Organizers will need approximately $20 million to complete the project and about half of that total has been raised to date.

Proceeds from the Gala Celebration will help support that effort and in December, Womble Carlyle contributed $10,000 to the Campaign to Complete the Dream. The firm has pledged to contribute an additional $10,000 in each of the next two years.

Thursday night, the three living members of the "Greensboro Four" were in attendance and honored for their contributions to justice, as were other civil rights champions. United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was posthumously awarded the International Civil and Human Rights Award, the organization’s highest honor.

Womble Carlyle attorney Virginia Hoptman, who clerked for Justice Marshall on the Supreme Court, accepted the award on his and his family’s behalf.

"Womble Carlyle is proud to honor the legacy of the Greensboro sit-ins and the positive change those events helped promote," said Gloria Agard, the firm’s Director of Diversity and Workplace Initiatives.

Also attending from Womble Carlyle were attorneys Alison Ashe-Card and Tripp Greason, Melissa Weaver, Office Manager for the firm’s Greensboro office; Laura Spain, the firm’s benefits manager; and Marina Skinner, knowledge management specialist. Special guests of the firm included Dr. Samuel Moseley, Political Science Department Chairman at North Carolina A&T State University; John and Laquetta Barbee of Banner Pharmacaps; Sam Pinero, 2006-07 Womble Carlyle Scholar from the Wake Forest University School of Law; and Wake Forest law school student Alex Reyes.