“The International Civil Rights Center & Museum: A portal into the 1960s”

By Matt Lee

A tourist attraction in downtown Greensboro recreates the civil rights movements through sight, sound and touch. 

The International Civil Rights Center & Museum (ICRCM) is not just a modern-day tourist attraction; it is a time capsule allowing visitors to transport themselves into the 1960s during the civil rights movement. Exhibits recreate sights, sounds and emotions from civil rights history in a location where four first-year students sat at a lunch counter and changed the tide of the civil rights movement.

A sepia picture of four African-American men greeted me as I walked through the entrance of the ICRCM. The security guard watched me from behind his marble desk scratching his head as 30 or so Elon students and staff flocked in for a tour. Not many people seem to come to this place what looks to be another typical museum with historical photos and informational plaques. Our tour guide, Marcus Van Hagen, ushered us through the main lobby. He took us downstairs into a dark hallway called the “Hall of Shame.”

Fluorescent pictures framed in shapes that looked like broken glass immediately surrounded me. Van Hagen hardly said anything; the pictures spoke for themselves. Every picture represented one of countless heinous acts committed against black people and their white supporters. Red lights signifying the bloodshed directed me past each gruesome photo. A speaker system overhead played chants from menacing Ku Klux Klan rallies and screams from Bull Connor’s unspeakable fire hosing of black children. The sights and sounds ended with a picture of Emmett Till, a boy whose face was so he could only be identified by a ring he had on his finger. The KKK had disfigured his face with barbed wire after he flirted with a white woman. This exhibit guided me through decades of African-American hate crimes. The “Hall of Shame” didn’t seem like an exhibit I would find at any other museum.

Van Hagen took us back upstairs into the main lobby. Next to the staircase that led us to the “Hall of Shame” were two doors. I walked through these doors to find a lunch counter, one that had been preserved from the time of the civil rights movement.

In the 1960s, F.W. Woolworth retail store was the main attraction on South Elm Street. But in 2010, the ICRCM took over the Woolworth building. The lunch counter, sitting in front of me, is the only original part of F.W. Woolworth still around besides the building. Menus offering 10-cent coffee and 65-cent turkey sandwiches and an antique cash register completed the scene. New seats and five TV screens were the only new additions. Behind the counter, I watched a film on the TV screens about a sit-in that occurred in this very spot about 50 years prior.

Four first-year students from North Carolina A&T State University decided to stand up to segregation and sit at a “whites-only” lunch counter in the F.W. Woolworth retail store on Feb. 1, 1960. In the film, actors wore clothes from the 1960s and talked with southern accents, reacting how many citizens would after seeing four African-American men sit at a “whites-only” lunch counter. The ICRCM’s film and the 1960s environment come together to recreate what it would have been like to witness the first sit-in of the civil rights movement.

Outside the lunch counter, Van Hagen led us through another scene from the 1960s. The exhibit entitled “Stranglehold” provided another glimpse of segregated America. As I walked through the exhibit, a replica of the Greensboro Rail Depot “colored” entrance stood overhead. Van Hagen said the exhibit is designed to make visitors feel claustrophobic in order to represent the strict environment of the colored section of the train depot. Inside the exhibit, a barrier separates an authentic Coca-Cola machine into two parts, like it would have been in the 1960s. I looked at the soda machine from two sides. Coca-Cola on the side for white people is only 5 cents, but Coca-Cola on the side for colored people is 10 cents. According to Van Hagen, ice companies would only put ice in the white side of the soda machine forcing blacks to pay twice as much for a hot soda. This exhibit forced me to experience segregation and the “stranglehold” it had on African Americans in their struggle for equality.