Four black college students from the North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical College staged the first of the Civil Rights
Movement’s sit-ins. The students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch
counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and attempted to order
but were refused service. The sit-in movement grew to more than
140 cities. Participants faced harassment, violence, and arrest
in their attempts to integrate public lunch counters. The
Chicago Defender was an influential black newspaper founded in
1905 that, during the early and mid-twentieth century, was a
major force in encouraging the Great Migration of African
Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Labor agents
were facilitators of black migration during the Jim Crow era.
Labor agents were paid by northern industrialists to recruit
southern blacks to work in factories in the North. Though labor
agents helped bring black workers to the North, many African
Americans eventually returned to the South after finding work
and living conditions in the in