Ordering Coffee Changes the World

Never underestimate the power of four teenagers.

Fifty years ago, a deliberate act of disobedience by four college kids shook America.

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they'd been refused service. Ordering coffee at an all-whites lunch counter was an incredible act of courage. This was a time when young black men were lynched for supposedly looking the wrong way at a white woman.

Here is the original NYTimes