International Civil Rights Center and Museum is located in Greensboro, NC, United States, and is dedicated to the civil rights movement. Its original home was the Woolworth’s department store, which was the site of a nonviolent civil rights protest during the civil rights movement.
Greensboro sit-ins began on February 1, 1960, when four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) demonstrated outside a whites-only lunch kiosk in Greensboro. Their goal is to ensure that history remembers the activities of the A&T Four, as well as those who joined them in the daily Woolworth’s sit-ins and others across the country who participated in sit-ins and the civil rights struggle during the 1960s.
The Museum is now supported by profits from earned admissions and sales from the Museum Store. To ensure that the project’s operations can continue, private donations are also accepted as a source of funding. After being formed in 1993, the museum formally opened its doors on September 11, 1993, fifty years to the day after the Greensboro sit-in movements began.
The building was designed in the Art Deco style by the architect Charles Hartmann. The Whelan Structure, which was completed in 1929 and rented the majority of the space to the Whelan Drug Co., was the name of the building at the time. Woolworth relocated into its current location in 1939. As part of the Downtown Greensboro Historic District, the structure is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
For a charge, visitors can participate in docent-led and self-guided tours. In the bottom level, visitors are exposed to the segregated society of the 1960s through video presentations, which serve as a starting point for the tour. A graphic Hall of Shame exhibit depicts the violence against civil rights protestors of all races and ethnicities around the United States.
Visitors are introduced to the four students through a replication of their planning session, which takes place against the backdrop of the original furniture from their dorm room at A&T College, which dates from 1960.
Visitors are also directed to the main level of the museum, where the large lunch bar, which is still in its original 1960 L-shaped design, takes up nearly the whole width and half the length of the structure.