Vol. 74/No. 7      February 22, 2010

Later in the day more than 1,000 people, mostly students from area campuses, marched from A&T to the new museum, along the route the four students took 50 years ago. At Bennett College in Greensboro, one of two historically Black women’s colleges in the United States, alumnae who had helped organize the sit-ins recounted how they had met with students from A&T and meticulously planned the action months in advance.

Lorraine Stanback and her second cousin Mia Ingram drove nine hours from New Jersey to join the celebration in their hometown. Stanback marched with a handmade sign that said, “The Will to Sit Down 4 Equality.”

Speakers at the opening included U.S. senator Kay Hagen; Gov. Beverly Purdue; Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, representing the Obama administration; and Rev. Jesse Jackson. But it was McCain who got the biggest response.

McCain spoke for the “Greensboro Four”—himself, Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.), and Joseph McNeil, who both attended the opening, and the late David Richmond. McCain said some things have changed for Blacks and many things have stayed the same. More Blacks are in school but more are also in prison. “Take pride. Take joy. But more than anything else, take charge,” he added.

The sit-ins that began here in 1960 sparked a national movement that spread to 55 cities in 13 states and helped lead to the desegregation of lunch counters and other public facilities. In Greensboro the sit-ins continued, with both Black and white students joining the protests, until July 1960 when the store was forced to desegregate the lunch counter.

Exhibits at the new museum include a “Hall of Shame,” which documents lynchings and Jim Crow segregation, including “Whites only” and “Colored only” signs and a double-sided Coke machine—one side to be used by whites and the other side by Blacks.

But mainly the museum’s displays are testimony to the steadfast fight that Blacks waged for their rights, with exhibits of protesters standing up to attacks by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and other mileposts in the civil rights movement. Mug shots show the faces of more than 1,200 protesters arrested throughout the South and the first Black students to integrate public schools.

The lunch counter stools where the sit-ins took place are a highlight of the museum, still in their original spot. Other artifacts include a Ku Klux Klan robe, footage of the National Guard escorting a Black student into a previously all-white school, and many others that record the story of the fight in the 1960s to end Jim Crow segregation.
 
 
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