JOSEPH A. McNEIL, MAJOR GENERAL,
MCNEIL’S BLACK SCHOOL
ROOTS SHAPED CIVIL
RIGHTS ACTIVISM
By Cash Michaels
An analysis
“I can remember poignantly as a kid coming up, I had a dog - and a boy and his dog, it’s like his best friend,” Joseph A. McNeil once recalled for this reporter during an interview in 2013. “My dog was a huge dog, and his name was ‘Trigger.’ Trigger got hit in his hind legs by a car, and my Dad and I cared a heck of a lot about Trigger, so we took him to the veterinarian.”
“And the vet refused to work on Trigger, and the reason he said he couldn’t do that, or wouldn’t do that, was because Trigger was ‘a colored dog,’” McNeil continued, his voice now taking on an incredulous tone.
“That was an example of the type of mentality that existed [in Wilmington]. So we went to another veterinarian eventually, but that absurdity was characteristic of the time.”
The “time” was the 1940s, and the place, Joseph McNeil’s hometown of Wilmington, NC, was a tough place for African-Americans to live. There were no real job opportunities, unless a black male wanted to graduate from high school to become an assistant on a soda truck. Racism was so pronounced, what few black teachers that existed at the all-black senior high school there, Williston Senior High, not only demanded the highest academic standards from students like McNeil, but openly prepared them to be twice as good as their white counterparts, because segregation was very much the law of the land.
That inculcation of black academic and cultural excellence, in addition to a deep-seeded anger of not only seeing what racism had, and was still doing to his community and his generation, is what provoked a 17 year-old Joseph McNeil as a college freshman at NC A&T State University in Greensboro on February 1st, 1960, to walk with three classmates into the F. W. Woolworth five and dime store in downtown Greensboro, sit down at the “whites only” lunch counter, and openly defy racial segregation laws by demanding to be served as regular customers.
That singular act of nonviolent social and civil rights activism, though not the first at the time, was powerful enough to send shockwaves not only throughout Greensboro, but North Carolina, and eventually, the rest of the South and nation. It reignited a sluggish civil rights movement, inspired thousands of black and white students to stage other sit-ins, spurred the founding of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) at Shaw University in Raleigh under the tutelage of civil rights icon Ella Baker; spawned the Freedom Rides in 1961 to desegregate interstate bus transportation; the 1963 March on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and passage by Congress of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.
As The NY Times recently reported: "As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. struggled to build a nationwide movement after the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, it was “those four guys on Feb. 1 who really do set the Southern Black freedom struggle of the 1960s,” Pulitzer Prize winning historian Dr. David Garrow said.
All of that extraordinary social change, because four NC A&T State University students, led by a young Joe McNeil, had decided that they had enough of racial injustice.
“People were angry, kids were angry that they were treated differently, that there were people overtly and covertly working to deter or hurt their ability to achieve,” McNeil once told this reporter. “Somebody would take time out of their life to make sure, or to make you less of a human being, or attempt to do that. Well, we weren’t buying that act.”
McNeil, who would later graduate NC A&T in 1963 with an engineering physics degree; serve six years in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War; join the Air Force Reserve; work for the Federal Aviation Administration and retire in 2000 at the rank of two-star major general, died Sept. 4th in a hospice in Port Jefferson, on Long Island, N.Y..
He was 83, and is survived by his wife of many years, Ina; three sons, Alan, Joseph, Frank (a fourth son, Ron, passed away in March); a daughter, Jacqueline; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Mr. McNeil is the third member of the four original NC A&T State University students involved in the February 1960 Woolworth sit-in to pass.
David Richmond died in 1990, and Franklin McCain passed in 2014.
Ezell Blair, Jr. (now known as Jibreel Jhazan) is the sole survivor.
And that Woolworth store the Greensboro Four targeted with nonviolent action, closed in 1993, later to be reopened as the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, now an official historic landmark, featuring the lunch counter sat at by Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Ezell Blair, Jr..
In Sept. 2019, McNeil's hometown of Wilmington renamed North Third Street downtown "Maj. Gen. Joseph McNeil Way," in his honor.
Upon McNeil's death, the ICRCM issued a statement which said, in part, “His bravery as a college student carried forward into a lifetime of service, both as a decorated major general in the United States Air Force and as a steadfast advocate for freedom, fairness, and human dignity.”
NORTH CAROLINA RANKED
NUMBER THREE IN NATION
FOR BEST IN BLACK BUSINESS
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
According to a new survey out last month, North Carolina ranks #3 behind Georgia and Delaware, out of all 50 states, as the best for black-owned businesses in 2025.
In an online survey published by B2B Review, North Carolina ranked third because, “The state ranks tenth for the number of Black businesses, with 15.95% of all small businesses being Black-owned. Additionally, the state has the third-highest business success rate, at 60.7, which is more than the average (56.1%). Similarly, 20.50% of North Carolina’s population is Black, placing it ninth for that metric."
The B2B Review continued,”The Black median household income is 71.80% of the state’s median income for all races and higher than the national average of 70.19%. Black-owned businesses have the tenth-highest annual payroll, and North Carolina approved 3.21% of the total SBA loan approval amount in 2025.”
North Carolina ranked ahead of #4 South Carolina, #5 Maryland, #6 Alabama, #7 Texas, #8 Florida, #9 District of Columbia and rounding out the top ten, Virginia.
Georgia ranked #1 because “It has the highest percentage of Black-owned businesses (34.49%) in the nation, which is significantly higher than the national average (10.15%). The state also saw a 26.36% increase in Black businesses from 2023 to 2024, which is higher than the national average of 26.02%. Additionally, 31% of Georgia’s population is Black, placing it fourth for that metric, and significantly higher than the national average (11.01%).”
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