L-Shaped: Greensboro Epicenter, 1960-2010

Greensboro, North Carolina: the USA in microcosm. Deep history, going back centuries. Today, I had the great privilege of touring the recently opened International Civil Rights Center and Museum located in the F.W. Woolworth Co. building where the sit-in movement began on February 1, 1960, the epicenter of a seismic convulsion still in motion. Today, when anti-civil rights pushback is still in raw evidence (in Arizona, for example), too, seeing the Woolworth counter reinforces how far American society has come, and also how little. The actual lunch counter and grill is much larger than I imagined going in: more than fifty seats divided, like the country, into two wings in the shape of an L, or a V widened to a right angle.  It's a large space.

My cool Mom came, too, just as she came to see Obama at the Greensboro Amtrak stop back in the autumn of 2008. We were conducted through the Center and Museum by an excellent tour guide along with four other people. The exhibits mix multivisuals with artifacts and multiple insights. The experience is powerful -- seeing many Black Codes/Jim Crow law segregation/apartheid artifacts and their attendant vestiges of violence (lynchings, Emmett Till, firehoses, general brutality) up close. The exhibits end with a montage that taps into the universal drive for civil and human rights, always opposed by the status quo, always opposed by right wingers.

At the Greensboro Woolworth counter on February 1, 1960, four North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (NCA&T) students -- Ezell A. Blair, Jr., Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil and David L. Richmond -- began (or more accurately from a longer perspecive, continued) the earthquake by calmly sitting in the "Whites Only" section of the lunch counter. As the back of my ticket puts it, "They sat down so others could stand up."  This is a place to see in person.  Fifty years later and still counting, so much still to do, so much counter-push.

For more, please see: http://www.sitinmovement.org/home.asp

Today's Rune:  Joy.