Roland Allen: Really Random Stuff

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 that first sit-in. It expects to draw 200,000 visitors a year.

The museum 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 of Greensboro 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, even though the law didn't support it. 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."

Earl Jones, now a state legislator, was a city council member when he and Melvin "Skip" Alston, chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, went together 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; that, it turned out there was had a creek running through its foundation. They needed still more to pay for design work, renovations, artifacts and exhibits construction.

Two separate bond issues for the museum failed. But eventually, supporters 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 they were treated by local businesses, and 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.

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 businesses 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 being heckled and harassed over the simplest human 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 own daughter, in her 20s - already older than the Greensboro Four when they started the sit-in - had a difficult time believing that African-Americans were treated so poorly.

That's why this museum had to be built, Alston says, and why nearly 100 others have been built around 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 African-Americans, 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 section 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."

 

This is an important remembrance of the Civil Rights era.