GREENSBORO -- The student sit-in that started at the F.W. Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro on Feb. 1, 1960, forced the company to begin serving black patrons at its lunch counters in stores throughout the South. Yet other Greensboro businesses remained closed to African-Americans for years, and it was more than a decade before the city integrated its schools.
Likewise, it has taken longer than many people expected for a museum to come to life inside the former Woolworth building.
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum will open there Monday on the 50th anniversary of the sit-in that launched the movement. It expects 200,000 visitors a year. It will commemorate the birthplace of the sit-in movement and will honor the courage of those who challenged racial segregation and brought social change in this country and throughout the world.
"To me, this museum, which I consider to be prominent on a national level, serves as a testimony to how far we have come as a community and a country," said Anthony Wade, human relations director for the city and a man old enough to remember using "colored" drinking fountains as a child.
"It certainly speaks to the courage of four young men who were willing to take a stand for what was morally correct. ... And that sparked a national movement. Laws were changed, barriers were removed.
"Do we still have problems? We're always in a state of evolution. We're always trying to improve the quality of life."
The quality of life for African-Americans in Greensboro in 1960 was better than in many Southern cities, a reflection of Greensboro's complex and seemingly inconsistent racial history.
For 30 years in the 1800s, the city's large Quaker population had provided a stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves. After the Civil War, a Quaker man bought land at the city's edge where freed slaves could buy lots to build homes.
In 1873, what would become Bennett College was built for African-American students near the same site. What is now N.C. A&T State University moved to Greensboro from Raleigh 20 years later.
Then the city council voted in 1911 to require separate neighborhoods for blacks and whites.
But by 1951, the first black man had been elected to the council.
It went on like that, one step forward and one step back. Greensboro was the first city in the South to announce it would comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling banning segregated schools; then it took nearly 20 years to do it.
Even now, Greensboro struggles with perceptions of racial inequities. The city's new manager is black, as are the police chief, the school superintendent and the mayor who just left office.
The battle isn't over
But the city is still dealing with lawsuits claiming discrimination against blacks within the police department.
And there are still those who believe government officials were complicit in the events of Nov. 3, 1979, when a group of Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis opened fire on members of the Communist Workers Party before a planned march in a black neighborhood, killing five.
Melvin "Skip" Alston, chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, believes it might have been lingering racism that kept voters from approving two separate bond issues that would have provided financing for the civil rights museum. Or maybe, he says, some people just didn't like him and Earl F. Jones, two outspoken black men.
Jones, then a city councilman and now a state legislator, went together with Alston to buy the Woolworth building from First Citizens Bank. After the store closed in 1993, the bank talked about razing the building to make way for a parking deck.
Alston and Jones got the building with a $700,000 loan they paid off with donations to Sit-In Movement Inc., the organization they founded to turn the building into a museum. They needed millions more to stabilize the 1929 structure; it turned out there was a creek running through its foundation. They needed more still to pay for design work, renovations, artifacts and exhibits construction.
When the bond issues failed, Alston says, even people in his own organization began to wonder whether he and Jones should step aside.
"We said, 'No, we're not going anywhere,'" Alston recalled last week.
Eventually, the group raised $9 million in donations and grants, and then learned the museum could qualify for historic preservation tax credits that could be sold for $14 million. That was enough to get the work done, in time for an opening on the 50th anniversary of the start of the sit-in.
The museum has 30,000 square feet of exhibit space on two floors where shoppers once bought plastic flowers, white thread and chocolate-covered peanuts by the pound. It will take visitors back to a time when federal and state laws and local customs forbade black citizens from staying in the same hotels, eating in the same restaurants, sitting in the same sections of theaters and living on the same streets as white citizens.
Those strictures had long frustrated A&T freshmen Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond. They and others had discussed what they could do about the way local businesses treated them. They decided to walk the 15 minutes from campus to the Woolworth store, buy a few items, take a series of empty seats at the lunch counter and order some coffee.
A movement is born
They were asked to leave. They didn't. They stayed throughout the day and returned the next day with classmates who also took seats at the counter. The sit-in grew, then spread to other stores and types of business in other cities.
The Greensboro sit-in paused only to allow city officials and business people to discuss a solution. When none was offered, protesters resumed, until Woolworth changed its policy in late July.
The centerpiece of the new museum is the long, wraparound lunch counter where the students held their ground despite heckling and harassment over the simple desire to have a meal.
Children who will tour the museum by the busload take such a basic provision for granted. Even Skip Alston's daughter, in her 20s, had a difficult time believing that blacks were treated so poorly.
That's why this museum had to be built, Alston says, and why nearly 100 others have been built around in the country. In the past few years, new African-American cultural and history museums have opened in San Francisco, Baltimore and Charlotte. The Smithsonian will begin construction on a new national African-American museum in Washington in 2012, to be finished in 2015.
The architect for the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, Durham's Phil Freelon, has worked on all of those buildings and says they serve several purposes besides generating economic growth through tourism. They instill pride in young blacks, he says, teach people about the contributions African-Americans have made in history and in the development of U.S. culture, and unite people of all races.
"The story of the African-American is the quintessential American story - rising up from difficult circumstance, persevering against all odds, resiliency, thriving in the melting pot that is America , pursuing the American dream," Freelon said.
Photographs such as those of the victims of racial violence displayed in this museum, "Whites Only" signs that marked drinking fountains, and a row of swivel seats that was once beyond the reach of a segment of a city's citizenry are powerful storytelling aids.
"We have to be able to tell our story, the African-American story from our perspective," Alston said. "That story has to be told. It has to be told right."
