The Aggie Family Bids Farewell to Joseph McNeil of the A&T Four

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (Sept. 11, 2025) -- For 65 years, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has celebrated the activism of the A&T Four, the teenage freshmen who on February 1, 1960, launched a sit-in that breathed new life and vitality into the U.S. Civil Rights movement, propelling it toward the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On Thursday, North Carolina A&T laid one of those iconic men to rest.

Maj. Gen. Joseph A. McNeil Sr. passed away Sept. 4 after a long illness. He was 83. With his large family and close friends gathered in Harrison Auditorium, speaker after speaker took the stage to celebrate the man and his life, from his namesake, Joe McNeil Jr., to the sons of McNeil’s A&T Four compatriots to Bishop William J. Barber II, whose thundering eulogy overflowed with righteous passion, McNeil’s closed casket lying before him.

Barber recalled how by 1960, several years after Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., and a federal court ruled that racial segregation in public accommodations was unconstitutional, Southern businesses and local leaders continued to practice segregation, “insisting on the legality of division.”

“The civil rights movement was dying and divided. It had lost its energy. And then, four students who stayed in the same dormitory began to plan how they would sit down and teach a whole nation how to stand up,” said Barber. “They could have stood at the back window outside and been treated like second-class humans, one step removed from slavery, and got their food. And nobody would have thought bad of them because it was ‘the practical thing to do.’

“They could have stood and gone on to pass the tests of North Carolina A&T, but failed the test and the call of history.”

McNeil served as a catalyst for the four teens’ activism. Having experienced Jim Crow racism his entire life, he took a bus to the North Carolina A&T campus to begin his studies in the fall of 1959. At a bus stop in Virginia, he went inside with other passengers to buy a hot dog, but was refused service. He arrived at college angry and soon found three friends who felt the same way.

He began planning a protest, using tactical training he was learning as an ROTC cadet and wisdom from a local NAACP member, who befriended McNeil, to flesh out his ideas. Back at his dormitory, McNeil, David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Ezell Blair (now Jibreel Khazan) talked through their options. By the end of January, they had a plan and were ready.

On the afternoon of Feb. 1, they met at the F.D. Bluford Library on the A&T campus and began the 1-mile trek to the downtown Greensboro Woolworth’s. When they arrived, they purchased a few sundries before seating themselves at the whites-only lunch counter and asked to be served.

The rest is history.  

“Shakespeare wrote, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” I believe Gen. McNeil experienced greatness in all three ways,” A&T Chancellor James R. Martin II said to the hundreds of mourners in Harrison Auditorium. “As a teenager experiencing discrimination and bigotry daily, Joseph McNeil might have thrown up his hands in despair. Instead, he chose to believe that ‘a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.’

“Once that small group, led by him, did exactly that, he might have chosen a quiet life, content to have made his mark. Instead, he chose to serve his country so that liberty might be extended to others, and that they might breathe free.”

With McNeil’s passing, the final surviving member of the A&T Four is Jibreel Khazan.  

Other speakers at the memorial included Air Force Maj. Gen. Mitch Mitchell, Frank McCain Jr., David Richmond Jr., A&T Alumni Relations Associate Vice Chancellor Crystal W. Boyce and Deena Hayes-Greene, chair of the Sit-In Movement board of directors, which oversees the International Civil Rights Museum in downtown Greensboro. The centerpiece of that museum is the lunch-counter and barstools from the Woolworth’s that McNeil and the A&T Four made a critical part of American history.

The McNeil family held a memorial service last Saturday in Hempstead, N.Y., where Joseph McNeil lived, and will bury their patriarch this Saturday at a service in Wilmington.