McNeil and three other Black freshmen held a famous sit-in at Woolworth’s in 1960, which inspired peaceful protests across the country

He and his classmates from a historically Black college in Greensboro, N.C., desegregated a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, inspiring similar protests across the nation.

McNeil, 26, unfurled a quilt emblazoned with a star and a U.S. Air Force logo and draped it over the half-open coffin of Joseph McNeil, a civil rights icon and longtime Hempstead resident who died Thursday at age 83. Kangisi McNeil is a member of the Standing Rock Reservation, and the ritual is native to the culture, he said.

Joseph McNeil was one of four students who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960.

Within weeks of the protest that McNeil and three friends started, sit-ins were launched in more than 50 cities in nine states.

Flags in the state of North Carolina will be lowered to half-staff on Saturday in honor of a civil rights icon who helped to shape history in Greensboro. Major General Joseph McNeil, a Wilmington native,

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