Correction (Feb. 12,2020): The original version of this piece wrote that the photo with Bess was taken on the first day of the sit-ins. The photo was actually taken on the second day of the sit-ins with two of the original members of the A&T depicted along with Bess behind the counter.

Charles Bess walks hastily, arms pumping at his sides, through downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, weaving between the couples and parents with small children who crowd the sidewalk. He’s running late, and he’s left his jacket in the car.

Spritely, even at 82, with two tufts of bright, white hair he likes to fluff and shape gently with his hands every now and again, Bess soon arrives at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum and blends into the crowd.

It’s the 60th anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins, and the museum is packed. A few employees glance up from the ticket desk to smile warmly and welcome Bess into the building as they hurriedly admit a long line of college students at the counter. Other than that, Bess goes largely unnoticed by the dozens of people who fill the space.

As he makes his way past the groups of people, Bess pulls out his new cell phone (he lost his old one about a week ago) and pulls up a black-and-white image. It’s a familiar one, especially today. Four young African American men sit at a lunch counter and glance back over their shoulders at the cameraman. Three look directly into the lens. The fourth, the closest to the viewer, either ignores the shooter or has missed the invitation.

Many have written about the four men who sat defiantly on February 1, 1960, at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro. But on the other side of the counter stands a fifth person — another young African American man, this one in a white paper hat and a busboy uniform. His eyes are downcast, as if he, too, missed the cameraman’s cue — or, more than likely, looked deliberately away, not wanting to get too caught up in the moment. (Updated Feb. 12, 2020): The photo of Bess behind the counter was taken on Feb. 2, 1960 on the second day of the sit-ins with two of the original members of the sit-ins.

“That’s me!” Bess exclaims as he points to the man behind the counter. He laughs and emits a high-pitched giggle, one that resounds through the space and somehow makes Bess seem both aged and youthful at the same time.

Bess was 23 years old when he began working at Woolworth in Greensboro. He had come to the city in 1957 from Kings Mountain, about 130 miles away, to live with his sister, Virginia. It wasn’t long before he got a job at Woolworth, first as a dishwasher.

“It was hard work,” Bess says. “I would take the dishes off the elevator and put them in a tray and send the tray through the machine — the dishwasher. And then it would come out on the other side and I would leave [the dishes] in the tray and they would dry. Then I would stack the dishes up and put them on the little elevator and send them down to the lunch counter.”

Upstairs in the dish room he worked with just one other employee — an African American woman. They cleaned and rotated dishes throughout the day to keep up with demand.

“All the ones working up in the kitchen was blacks,” Bess says.

The waitresses were all white. The counter manager, whom Bess knew as Mrs. Holt, was also a white woman.

“Woolworth was kind of a hard place to work because sometimes the manager would get on you a lot, but she didn’t bother me too much because I did my job,” Bess says with pride.

About a year later, in 1958, Bess was promoted to busboy. The previous busboy had quit to attend college in Charlotte, and by then, Bess had won the approval of Mrs. Holt and was deemed worthy of working in front of the white customers. Downstairs, he sent dishes up to the dishwashers and made sure the waitresses had the plates they needed. He also served cakes and pies if needed.

It wasn’t a glamorous job, but Bess took pride in it.

“If you were going to be a busboy at Woolworth at that time, you had to be fast,” Bess says. “Oh yeah, I was fast. I think that’s why Mrs. Holt kept me there, cause she saw that I could keep up.”

February 1, 1960

Bess was working as a busboy on the day that Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond walked into the store. He says that before making their way to the counter, the young men bought some school supplies. Bess says he had seen other black people try to sit at the counter before the A&T Four, but none had attempted to stay after being asked to leave. After doing just that, the men kept calmly asking the waitresses for a cup of coffee each time one of them passed by.

“I remember it was kind of a cold day,” Bess says. “I guess that’s why they wanted the coffee.”

He remembers how one of them asked why he couldn’t be served if his money was just as good as anyone else’s. After being ignored by the waitresses, they stayed for about an hour until closing time.

“Here’s the thing,” Bess says. “They didn’t move. Nobody could understand that. They were just teenagers. It really took the younger guys to get it to boost off because at the time, the older people were afraid to do that. The older folks were set in their own ways. These four guys, they were not hungry for just food, they were hungry for a change.”

He was so surprised by their actions that he stopped working for a while and just watched the four students as they protested.

“I really wanted to see what was going to happen,” Bess says. “I was looking at ’em. I didn’t say nothing to them.”

And while the now-famous photograph shows Bess as reserved and a bit distant, Bess says, he was ecstatic on the inside.

“I was excited about it,” Bess says. “I was really excited to see it happen. I felt like whites and blacks and any other race should be able to sit down and eat together.”