Woolsworth Lunch Counter Now A Museum

The building which housed the F.W. Woolsworth Co. in
Greensboro South Carolina and was the site of one of the
first civil rights demonstration some fifty years ago
has now been turned into a museum and will be dedicated
in a ceremony today. Check out the story below and feel
free to comment on this historical event.





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.





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