The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. Theseats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approachedthe students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around ve-thirty, thefront doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd hadgathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of thestudents said.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem

solipsists

reensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence

n the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time toget Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There wasno Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of socialmedia in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t botherreaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” shewrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in anylanguage other than Farsi.”

he new tools of social media have reinvented social activism