Joseph McNeil, who helped sparked a protest movement at a North Carolina lunch counter, dies at 83

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FILE - Joseph McNeil speaks during a AFL-CIO conference in Greensboro, N.C., Jan. 16, 2010. (AP Photo/Lynn Hey, File)

RALEIGH, N.C. – Joseph McNeil, one of four North Carolina college students whose occupation of a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter 65 years ago helped spark nonviolent civil rights sit-in protests across the South, died Thursday, his family and university said. He was 83.

McNeil, who later became a two-star general, was one of four freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro who sat down at the local “whites only” counter on Feb. 1, 1960. The four were refused service and declined to give up their seats even as the store manager and police urged them to move on.

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