GREENSBORO -- No one who experienced the abuses of Jim Crow would relive that period in American history, but a museum opening Monday in Greensboro will evoke for visitors the days when blacks and whites were separated by laws, walls and ignorance.
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum uses the former F.W. Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro to remind people what segregation was like and how change was wrought in the way African-Americans were treated every day of their lives.
On Monday, Feb. 1, 1960, four young black men - freshmen from nearby A&T State University - walked into Woolworth's, sat down at the lunch counter that wrapped around two walls of the store, and tried to order something to eat. But as in most restaurants in the South at the time, the lunch counter was whites-only.
Instead of getting lunch, they got cursed at and spat upon. Other patrons poured drinks over their heads.
The next day, they came back, and they kept coming back, joined by dozens of supporters, picketers and press. By July, Woolworth relented, and integrated the lunch counters in every one of its hundreds of stores.
The sit-in, imitated in other Woolworth stores at the time and other types of businesses later, became an effective tool in the push for civil rights in this country and beyond.
But that event 50 years ago, and the frustration that led the students to attempt it, may be lost on people who never felt segregation's sting, either because they were on the white side of the equation, or they were born and raised after Jim Crow laws had been overturned.
Amelia Parker, executive director of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, says she has had two audiences in mind as she worked over the past five years to develop the museum's program and collect the artifacts, photographs and other elements that will tell the story.
"We had a responsibility to tell an authentic story so the people who championed this cause would see themselves as they walked through," she said last week as workers installed final exhibits.
"And we also want for those children who have not yet been taught hatred to understand where we were so we don't go back."
Walking through history
Visitors will enter the 30,000-square-foot museum off South Elm Street just as shoppers did for decades when the store was a five-and-dime. They will be directed to the basement level, beginning their tour in a gallery called, "All Men are Created Equal," which summons the era of Jim Crow by recalling some of the ways African-Americans were kept apart from whites.
From there, they step into "The Hall of Shame," a display of photos of racist violence so graphic that there is a detour route for children under 12. The black-and-white images have been enlarged and back-lit, and they are broken into jagged pieces, multiplying their shattering effect. They include photos of the bodies of victims of lynchings and burnings, and the photo of Emmett Till's brutally battered face as he lay in his coffin, an image that caused national outrage when it was published after the child's murder in 1955.
With those horrific scenes fresh in their minds, visitors will step into a small theater where they can watch a film re-enactment of the Sunday night dorm room discussion of Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr. about what might happen if they dared to walk in and sit down at the Woolworth lunch counter the next day. A section of wall in the amphitheater includes bricks from Scott Hall, the dorm where the men lived, which was shot up by the National Guard during civil rights protests in 1969 and torn down in 2004.
From there, visitors walk down a corridor, as if walking toward Woolworth with the Greensboro Four, encouraged as they go by the words of notable African-Americans who had done their own work in opening doors. By the time visitors reach the up escalator at the end of the corridor, the trip to the lunch counter feels inevitable.
And it is. Visitors get off the escalator at the heart of the museum, the long, narrow stretch of laminated counter top and the swiveling chrome-and-vinyl chairs that were so simple but so inaccessible to a whole race of people.
Woolworth left the lunch counter - along with plates, silverware, milkshake machines and cash registers - when the company closed the store in 1993, knowing of the hopes of turning the building into a museum. Sections of countertop and strings of chairs also were donated to the nearby Greensboro Historical Museum and to a museum in the Smithsonian Institution.
Behind the lunch counter, on flat screens fitted into what used to be the steel backsplash over the grill, footage of the sit-ins will play.
From there, the tour leads through a replica of one entrance of the old Greensboro passenger train depot. The stone entablature is inscribed, "COLORED ENTRANCE."
Exhibits on the other side will shine a light on historical discrimination in education, voting, employment, transportation, housing and recreation, and describe the role of the church in social empowerment and organization.
The museum is enriched by artifacts and photos it has collected over the past 16 years, beginning with the building itself, which dates to 1929 and would have been razed for the construction of a parking deck had two local African-American leaders, Melvin "Skip" Alston and Earl F. Jones, not borrowed the money to save it.
Notable items displayed include a uniform worn by Capt. Harvey Alexander, a member of the first graduating class of all-black airmen trained at the Tuskegee Institute for service during World War II; a robe worn by a member of the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan; a pictorial, slave-era Bible from a family in Winston-Salem; one of the pens President Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and a double-sided Coke machine designed for a segregated waiting room, offering chilled refreshment to blacks on one side and whites on the other.
A curious student of history could spend a couple of hours in the museum; guided tours will take about 45 minutes.
Museum organizers expect about 200,000 guests a year, drawing locals who remember Woolworth's and the sit-in, but also national and international visitors who have an interest in social justice movements.
"This is not a black story or a white story," said curator Bamidele Demerson. "It's an American story, and it shows the power of goodwill to transform the nation for the betterment of all."
