GREENSBORO, N.C. — The sign still says “F. W. Woolworth Co.” in bright gold letters running across the building on South Elm Street, just as it did 50 years ago. And within that two-story structure, the same stainless steel dumbwaiters and commercial appliances line the mirrored walls. The lunch counter, which includes a bowling-alley-long tabletop that must dwarf any currently in use, is largely intact; the original chrome and vinyl chairs are still mounted in the floor. This site is an authentic, half-century-old relic, a remnant of the mundane, the insignificant, the quaint.
But one of the achievements of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which is opening Monday in that former Woolworth building, is that you begin to understand how such a place became a pivot in the greatest political movement of the 20th century.
In the museum’s 30,000 square feet of exhibition space, the mundane luncheonette reminds us that a cataclysmic social transformation took place over the right to be ordinary. For that was what was at stake — not subtle and arcane matters of law or obscure practices that challenged eccentric codes of behavior, but the basic acts of daily life: eating, drinking, sleeping, working, playing. It was here, at this luncheonette counter, that four 17-year-old freshmen at the all-black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina — Joseph A. McNeil, Franklin E. McCain, David L. Richmond and Ezell A. Blair Jr. — arrived on Feb. 1, 1960, sat down and ordered some food.
And when they were refused — refused because they were black, because much of Greensboro was racially segregated, and because Woolworth headquarters had decreed that the company policy was “to abide by local custom” — the four students continued to sit in mute protest.
They returned the next day and the next. Within a week 1,000 protesters and counterprotesters packed the store. By the end of March “sit-ins” had spread to 55 cities in 13 states. By mid-April the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been established to expand student involvement. And by the end of July, when the Greensboro Woolworth’s counter was finally desegregated, this form of nonviolent protest had become one of the central strategies of the American civil rights movement.
So not long after this Woolworth announced its closing in 1993, the building was acquired with the hope of making it a museum. It took $23 million in public and private funds to fulfill that vision; the museum’s architects are the Freelon Group of Durham, N.C., and its exhibitions were designed by Eisterhold Associates of Kansas City, Mo.
Its founders, Melvin Alston, a Guilford County commissioner, and Representative Earl Jones of the North Carolina legislature, are expected to attend Monday morning’s opening ceremony on the 50th anniversary of the sit-in, along with state and national officials. One of the original protesters, Mr. McCain, a retired chemist who made his career in Charlotte, is scheduled to speak. Two others, Mr. McNeil and Jibreel Khazan (the name Mr. Blair now uses) will also be onstage; the fourth, Mr. Richmond, died in 1990.
Of course, since this museum was conceived, civil rights institutions and memorials have been proliferating, but the task of capturing the full scope of the movement seems ever more imposing. As it recedes in time, its history grows not smaller and simpler but grander and more complex. And this museum, in a region where ordinary life was a matter of bitter conflict, looks at the movement not as an uplifting triumph — which it surely was, however imperfect and however incomplete — but as a heroic battle fought through a dark maze of grim restrictions and dangerous confrontations. No doubt it was that as well.
As the museum’s executive director, Amelia Parker, explained in an interview, one purpose of the museum is to remind the visitor just what was at stake in the seemingly innocuous act of approaching the lunch counter. It celebrates that protest while also resurrecting for the visitor the full scope of the Jim Crow laws against which the movement rebelled. It does this so vividly that it inspires an emotional reaction: dismay at the moral blindness and anger at the injuries caused. One weakness of the museum’s opening exhibitions is that they try to amplify events or sentiments when they are powerful enough to speak on their own.
So far has consciousness changed in 50 years that just the sight of signs of Jim Crow segregation in an opening gallery is chilling, with declarations of “White Only” or “For Colored” joined by one earlier sign announcing a slave auction. “Plenty of good Negroes,” it proclaims, “non-quality sold by the dozen.” With such an example, the sarcasm of the display — the signs are seen behind a scrim of the American flag and the words “All men are created equal” — seems bluntly superfluous.
The passions behind those signs can be more directly felt in a Hall of Shame, through which, Ms. Parker said, visitors under 12 will be allowed to pass only when accompanied by an adult. On fractured frames and accompanied by sound effects of water hoses or tree limbs creaking with the weight of lynched bodies are horrific photographs of racist violence: the 1930 lynching of two men in Marion, Ind.; the 1919 burning of the body of a black man, Will Brown, in Omaha; police dogs attacking protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963; the swollen, battered face of Emmett Till at his open-coffin funeral in Chicago in 1955. The images enforce a visceral sense of the brutish racial hatred at work.
It is almost a relief to enter a small theater showing a filmed dramatization of a dorm-room bull session in which four freshmen discuss their plans to sit at the Woolworth lunch counter. You then pass through a Hall of Courage, which imagines the walk the four protesters took, approaching Woolworth (in a historical photo) in the distance. You pass by images of stores and homes and trees — touching reminders of the mundane — and as you get closer, you pass by looming images of the inspirational heroes in whose path these young men are said to be walking, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.
Unfortunately these figures seem less to suggest influence than to exaggerate the stature of the four young men, who can be admired for their achievement without such sanctification. Far more effective would have been to stick with the mundane tone of the luncheonette exhibit itself. Visitors sit at the long counter (part of which is a reproduction; an eight-foot portion of the original is on display at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington) and gaze into mirrors that become video screens seeming to reflect the sit-in.
Then, leaving the luncheonette, you pass back into the Jim Crow world of the second half of the museum. The impact and sweep of these galleries are actually more intense than the bursts of violence seen earlier, because here you see the full scope of segregation and its system of laws and customs.
You pass through a reproduction of an arch leading into the Greensboro train depot, labeled “Colored Entrance.” (One side of the depot was built as a lesser duplicate of the other.) A little farther on is a double-sided Coca-Cola machine from this era (the date is not specified): one side of the machine was meant to serve whites, and the others blacks. One side advertises soda for 5 cents, the other 10, though it is not clear who was meant to get the better bargain.
There are images of segregated buses, want ads specifying the race of the desired employee, a sign from a Birmingham theater (“Colored must sit in balcony”), the door from a bathroom of a Greensboro store labeled “Colored Women.” A 1941 “Negro Motorist Green-Book,” published for black tourists, is on display, resembling an AAA guide, listing establishments in every state and major city that would welcome them: hotels, restaurants, garages, beauty parlors, haberdashers.
The effect is overwhelming and unrelenting, mixing image and spare text, recounting the importance of black churches and the scope of the attacks on them, the segregation of hospitals and medical care, the baleful effects of separate and unequal education. There are interactive displays of racially loaded literacy tests, a survey of legal challenges and courtroom strategies, and, all too briefly, a history of the movement’s evolution and a Wall of Remembrance naming its martyrs.
The point, of course, is not to show a collection but to share an experience. In this the museum is fully successful. The taste of justified bitterness runs through it.
But there is an important qualification to be made. Photographs and objects weren’t labeled when I saw them last week, and it was unclear how much detail would be available about times and places. The images of racial violence that were a prelude to the Woolworth exhibit include events that took place as early as 1919 and as late as 1963, well after the sit-in. And the movement itself is more complicated than suggested. There were effective sit-ins before Greensboro. There also were debates over the strategy (the national NAACP initially opposed sit-ins). And later splits among both black and white activists are elided. This museum is not a history of the movement.
There is an ahistorical tendency here, in which particular detail is put aside for broad impact. To a certain extent this must be done in any commemoration, particularly one as fraught with passion and urgency as this. But more attention to the nuances of the movement wouldn’t have hurt the museum’s cause; it would have strengthened it.
And finally, when generalizing outward, the museum is less intent on the movement’s successes (which should be made more evident) than on the existence of continuing and unresolved problems. It ends with a gallery that cites President Obama’s speech on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which stressed how many walls exist that must still come down. There is even a piece of the Berlin Wall here, along with a tribute to the worldwide impact of nonviolent protest movements.
But those movements had little to do with the fall of the wall. It is also difficult to shift perspectives so dramatically and globally celebrate a tactic when the museum’s concerns have been so different. Surely it is enough that one has been immersed in a story of a struggle that was so necessary, so compelling and, on balance, so triumphant.
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum is at 132 South Elm Street, Greensboro, N.C.; (336) 274-9199, sitinmovement.org.
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