Restaurant Sign in Lancaster, Ohio 1936, Courtesy of the US National Archives
In Greensboro, North Carolina, Barry’s Grill was one of the most popular places in the city’s African-American community. Betty Johnson of Attalla, Alabama, briefly attended the HBCU North Carolina A&T in the 1950s. Before the 1960 student sit-in movement at the Woolworth’s and S. H. Kress store lunch counters, fear of white violence dissuaded her and her classmates at A&T, and most likely Bennett College too (another HBCU in the city), from ever trying to enter white restaurants in downtown Greensboro. Instead, they enjoyed the fried chicken and pork chops available at black-owned Barry’s Grill.
