Vice President Harris sat at the same “whites only” Woolworth's counter where the “Greensboro Four” held a peaceful sit-in protest against segregation on February 1, 1960.
Vice President Kamala Harris made an impromptu stop at the International Civics Rights Center and Museum on Monday during a trip to North Carolina to promote President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, the Associated Press reported.
Harris, the first woman and first person of color to be vice president, sat at the same “whites only” Woolworth's counter where students Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.), and David Richmond — known as the “Greensboro Four” — held a peaceful sit-in protest against segregation on February 1, 1960, and described it as a “defining” moment in the civil rights movement, according to a published report.
It was not the first time Harris has honored the “Greensboro Four.” In a 2019 Twitter post she posted, “our youth have always been the driving force of movements for change. Today we honor and recognize 4 NC A&T Aggies — students who held the first sit-in of the civil rights movement.”
During the visit, Harris, who told reporters she had met civil rights icon Rosa Parks more than a decade ago, was photographed sitting in the same diner seat Parks sat in when she visited the museum in 1995, People reported.
She stopped at the exhibit of the bus seat that Parks refused to give up to a white man in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, and pointed to a photograph of the late Rep. John Lewis, an important leader of the civil rights movement, who served in Congress for 33 years. He died in July at age 80 of pancreatic cancer.
