Civil-rights history preserved

GREENSBORO

The vinyl is cracked in spots, faded to pale shades of blue and pink, the empty stools lined up like soldiers against the long sweep of metal dishwashers, sinks and refrigerators. A small sign advertises a turkey dinner: Sixty-five cents. All white meat.

The downtown Greensboro Woolworth lunch counter is more than a novel relic from the days when you could buy a meal for less than a dollar.

That's why it was saved.

The International Civil Rights Center and Museum will open Monday in the old variety store, exactly 50 years after four N.C. A&T College freshmen -- Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain and David Richmond -- walked into the store on an unusually warm winter afternoon and sat down in a place where they weren't wanted. Their quiet protest sparked a sit-in movement across the segregated South.

To a co-founder of the museum, Rep. Earl Jones, D-Guilford, it's the end of a long road to get the building restored and updated.

"That was a historic moment, that was a historic site and worthy of preserving," Jones said. "Once you tear it down, you lose it. You can't recapture that time, that moment, that space, that building, those seats."

Jones was 11 and living in neighboring Alamance County when the Greensboro sit-in happened. He remembers his parents watching television and talking about it. "My parents were all into it. I had relatives here. Of course, they would talk to my parents. They were all excited about it, from my recollection. I wasn't really sensitive or aware one way or another."

But as an adult, he knew that history happened at the Woolworth building. He often ate at Woolworth's in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he was running the Guilford County Community Action Program. "My office was across the street and I would eat over there at least once a week, breakfast or lunch or something."

By then, Jones was a city council member, and he was worried that the store was going to close. Woolworths across the country were closing. In 1992, Jones tried what he called a "reverse boycott," rallying people to patronize the store.

The effort wasn't enough to keep the downtown Woolworth's open. It closed in 1994.

"In America there are very few places where history occurred and you have the actual site,'' Jones said. "You have a few places, like the Lorraine Motel where King was assassinated."

The trick now was not to let the Woolworth's building be demolished.

Sitting down, changing the South

On the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1960, Blair (who later changed his name to Jibreel Khazan), McNeil, McCain and Richmond walked into the Woolworth building on North Elm Street and bought a few small items in the store. Then the four friends sat at the long, L-shaped counter and asked for coffee.

They were refused. They were even scolded by a black counter worker.

"I think there was a feeling among particularly older black people in the city, when you ruffle feathers or you did demonstrations, you made the black race look bad or uncivilized," said Jason Alston, the diversity librarian at UNC Greensboro, who has researched the era.

"There was a feeling, this is how it is, this is how it always has been. It was one of those things that people didn't feel anything was wrong. After sit-ins started, they started to reassess things. That's why the movement grew so quickly."

The friends continued to sit, though. They sat until the store closed, and the next morning they came back, this time with other black students. Some of them took out books and studied quietly as they occupied lunch-counter seats. The sit-in grew by the day: Members of the A&T football team came out to ferry protesters through a crowd of hecklers, and three white students from Women's College (now UNCG) joined the effort.

Attempts to reach the three living members of the "Greensboro Four" for this story were unsuccessful (Richmond died in 1990).

In 2000, during an anniversary observance in then largely empty Woolworth's, Khazan talked about the sit-in in a Winston-Salem Journal story.

"We were prepared to give up our lives if necessary," he said. "I must admit I preferred to eat my mother's cooking. But we came for the principle. A lot of people didn't want us to sit down and eat with them. For some people, that was like us coming to eat at their dining-room table."

Within days, similar sit-ins had spread to cities across North Carolina and beyond, 54 cities in nine states within eight weeks, said William Chafe, a history professor at Duke University. They were relatively peaceful, though protesters endured jeering, opposing sit-ins by white men protesting the black sit-ins, and arrests. In Greensboro, for example, members of white gangs waved Confederate flags and a white man was arrested for trying to burn a black man's coat with a piece of paper.

Winston-Salem's sit-in started on Feb. 8, when Carl Matthews, 26, sat down at the downtown Kress lunch counter on Fourth Street, smoking and drinking water while white customers were served around him. Soon, he was joined by black students from Winston-Salem Teachers College and Atkins High School. White students from Wake Forest University supported the effort and staged a joint sit-in at the Winston-Salem Woolworth's on Feb. 23 on Fourth and Liberty streets. Twenty-one students were arrested.

"I wouldn't have done what I did if they hadn't done what they had," Matthews, who still lives in Winston-Salem, said in a recent interview. "I would do it again."

The sit-ins resulted in change. Winston-Salem's lunch counters quietly started to serve blacks on May 25, 1960, the first city in North Carolina to do so; by the end of July, Greensboro was doing the same.

Saving the building

It was in late 1993 that Jones and his friend, Melvin "Skip" Alston, a Guilford County commissioner, began batting around ideas to save the Greensboro Woolworth building when Alston suggested that they turn it into a civil-rights museum. They incorporated as Sit-In Movement Inc., raising money for the museum.

First Citizens Bank, which owned the building and planned to tear it down to make room for a parking lot, eventually met with them and agreed to sell it for tax value, $700,000.

Sixteen years later, the museum is finally opening at a total cost of $23 million. About 60 percent of the money came from federal tax credits, Jones said.

The lunch counter is still there, some seats with televisions as a backdrop, which will play video re-creations of the sit-in.

Other exhibits in the 30,000-square-foot space: an introductory exhibit to transition visitors from today to the Jim Crow South; a "hall of shame" that explores the violence and turbulence of the civil-rights movement; a reproduction of the Greensboro Rail Depot, a major stop for travelers entering the segregated South; and an exhibit that follows discrimination in education, voting, housing, employment, transportation and recreation.

Future plans, Jones said, include making the museum a center for continuing discussions and seminars on issues such as immigration and health care.

Sometimes it seemed that Greensboro didn't want to save the Woolworth building. Its voters turned down two referendums to contribute money to the project.

There were setbacks with construction and the complications of turning an old building into a modern museum.

Jones said the original schedule for the building was from 12 to 14 years.

"Whether it took 10 years or 20 years, it wouldn't have been a big deal for me. I would rather it be done right. We didn't have the option of tearing down the building and building a new complex," he said.

"I feel gratified, more so for some many of the citizens who wanted this project to happen. There were quite a few citizens presently living who were part of the sit-in struggle in Greensboro. Our success is really their success."

Right environment

Chafe argues that it's the paradox of Greensboro, and indeed, the entire state's self-image, that created the right environment for the sit-ins. Chafe is the author of Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom.

White Greensboro thought of itself as a modern place within a progressive Southern state, Chafe said. That image was more of a mystique than reality. Greensboro was one of the first cities in the South to announce that it would comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court to overturn segregation in schools, yet it took until 1971 to integrate its schools. But that idea, that Greensboro was a city of civility, also allowed the sit-in movement to succeed and spread.

"There was not the kind of immediate repression," Chafe said. "So there was space for (sit-ins) to grow and develop. Had these started in Jackson, Miss., there would have been immediate violence, there would have been arrests.… By starting in Greensboro, you have the opportunity for momentum to build. By the time they get to the Deep South, they've already got a kind of a logical energy."

Greensboro wasn't the birthplace of civil-rights protests or the sit-in movement -- there were smaller, less successful ones across the country, including Durham, Chafe said -- but it moved civil rights forward in a way that other protests hadn't. "Essentially what it did was to create a whole new language and form of expression for civil-rights protest," he said. "It ignited the fire of protest that engulfs the South."

lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com
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