'We Kept the Fire Going'

'We Kept the Fire Going'. Student Activism in Columbia's Civil Rights Movement. , On February 1, 1960, four African American students at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro sat at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter and requested service. Their simple demand for equality ignited a generation and intensified the struggle for social justice in the American South. Inspired by the "Greensboro Four,” young Black South Carolinians conducted marches, sit-ins and demonstrations in a determined campaign to dismantle segregation. Simon Bouie, an Allen University student arrested during a sit-in at Eckerd's Drug Store in Columbia in March 1960, credits the student movement for accelerating the pace of change in Columbia and elsewhere. “It sharpened the movement,” he remembers “…we kept the fire going."