However, this was not the first time sit-ins had been used at lunch counters.  This method of nonviolent protest had been used in 1943, in Chicago by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) members, in St. Louis in 1949, and in Baltimore in 1953.  In these previous sit-ins, they had not garnered much attention from the media or the public.   

Despite the lack of success of previous lunch counter sit-ins, this time would be different.  On the first day of the sit-in, the four students, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr., arrived at Woolworth in the afternoon.  They took seats at the lunch counter, and encountered silence from the white patrons next to them.  At first they were ignored by the waitresses, and then were told that they could not be served.  The four sat silently.  When the police chief was notified, he told the store manager that nothing could be done as long as the students were not disruptive.  Since the police would not respond and the students would not budge, Woolworth closed early.  The students left with the intent to return the following day.  

After the first day, word spread about the sit-in, and two more students joined them on the second day.  After the media reported on the sit-in, on the following days, they were joined by more students, including white students.  

The effectiveness of the sit-ins were due in part to the behavior of its participants.  They dressed in their Sunday clothes, were quiet, nonviolent, and respectful.  Furthermore, many students brought their school textbooks, and studied while they sat at the lunch counters.

The sit-in movement spread to fifteen to twenty other cities.  Nashville, Tennessee quickly began their sit-in movement.  Prior to the Greensboro sit-in, Nashville students had been preparing through workshops for sit-ins.  So when they followed Greensboro's lead, they were ready.  On February 13, around five hundred students participated in the first sit-in.  They organized into groups, and went downtown to Woolworth, Kresge's, McCellan's, and other stores.  On the first day and the following days thereafter, they did not encounter any violence.  But on February 27, white teenagers attacked the student protestors.  When the police arrived, they let the white teens go, and arrested the sit-in protesters for disorderly conduct.  

By April, the sit-in movement had become a widespread form of nonviolent protest.  Over 78 cities had participated, there were over fifty thousand black students and whites protestors, and two thousand had been arrested.  On April 16, 1960, SCLC's Ella Baker organized a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.  In attendance were around 120 student leaders.  While organizations such as the SCLC had hoped that the students would join, the students instead founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize the sit-ins.

A few days after the conference, on April 19 in Nashville, the home of black attorney Z. Alexander Looby was destroyed by dynamite.  Looby had been targeted because he had represented the arrested student protestors.   Miraculously, Looby and his wife survived, and suffered minor injuries.  In response, students and community members marched to the City Hall.  Upon their arrival, they were met by Mayor Ben West.  Fisk University student, Diane Nash took the opportunity to ask him whether he thought it was right for lunch counters to discriminate on the basis of color.  The Mayor said no, it was wrong.  The Mayor's statement was reported in the newspaper the following day, and a few weeks later on May 10, six lunch counters in Nashville began serving black patrons.  

But the sit-ins did not stop.  In Greensboro, the sit-ins continued for five months until Woolworth and Kress integrated.  In some southern cities they continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Student sit-ins were also used to desegregate movie theaters and other public facilities.

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