International Civil Rights Center and Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina
When visitors to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, arrive at the actual lunch counter where the first prominent sit-ins began, “it’s like they’re in a sacred place,” said CEO John Swaine.
The center opened in 2010, 50 years after four students began sit-in protests at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. The former department store building was slated for demolition in the early 1990s, but local leaders Melvin “Skip” Alston and Earl Jones “understood what had taken place here, and they understood how profound that action was,” so they decided to save the property and turn it into the museum, Swaine said.
The sit-ins, which lasted from February 1 to July 25, 1960, spurred other nonviolent protests around the country. The museum’s 16 galleries focus on the Greensboro demonstrations, then expand to explore the American civil rights movement more broadly as well as nonviolent actions around the world.
The Hall of Shame reminds visitors “of what it was truly like for African-Americans in the 1900s through the late ’60s: the bombings, the hangings, the body burnings,” Swaine said. Guests will also experience what Jim Crow was like at local movie theaters, hospitals — even a reproduction train station waiting area. A two-sided Coca-Cola vending machine has one side for whites and another for blacks, who paid more for the “same Coke coming out from the same machine,” he said.
The museum is raising funds for four new exhibits about the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, also known as the “citizenship amendment,” that will bookend the current exhibits.
Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
Jackson, Mississippi
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened in December in Jackson, Mississippi, and “the reception has been absolutely phenomenal,” said museum director Pamela D.C. Junior.
Its eight galleries focus on the years 1945 to 1976, when Mississippi was on the front lines of the civil rights movement.
Early galleries explore the struggle for freedom by Mississippi slaves and their efforts to establish strong communities as freed citizens. From there, visitors step into the central rotunda, where the dramatic, soaring sculpture “This Little Light of Mine” changes color as songs sung during the civil rights movement play.
In Gallery Four, people learn how the end of World War II helped spark the civil rights movement because black veterans “got better treatment being overseas than they did when they came home,” Junior said. In the “Separate but Not Equal” exhibit, a schoolroom split down the middle shows the inequities in education: nice desks for white students, wooden benches for black students. Around the corner, the Bryant Grocery doors Emmett Till walked through are on display.
Visitors also learn about Freedom Riders; voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who led Mississippi’s Freedom Summer; and the Black Empowerment movement. Throughout the museum, guests will find small theaters playing films that tie into each exhibit.
The final gallery “puts it back on the patron” by asking them to leave quotes and answer questions about what they can do in their own communities. The final quote is from Oseola McCarty, a washerwoman and philanthropist who said, “If you want to be proud of yourself, you have got to do things you can be proud of.”
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
Birmingham, Alabama
Many visitors to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama are not only seeking to understand the lessons of the civil rights movement; many are also “seeking relevance of what’s going on in the contemporary context,” said president and CEO Andrea Taylor.
The institute is across the street from both Kelly Ingram Park, which served as a large-scale staging ground for civil rights protests and demonstrations, and the 16th Street Baptist Church, which the Ku Klux Klan bombed in September 1963, an attack that killed four girls.
The institute’s five galleries address the broader story of the civil rights movement, but the detail centers on what happened in Birmingham. The permanent exhibit includes the doors and bars of the Birmingham jail cell where King wrote his famous “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”
Two powerful moments for visitors are when they view the replica of the Freedom Rider bus that was bombed in the nearby city of Anniston and an actual KKK robe, “which is a very haunting experience,” Taylor said.
Some guests weep at the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church exhibit, which includes rubble from the church and pieces of stained-glass windows.
“It’s unfathomable that hate would rise to the level where people would think they would have to attack innocent children,” she said.
