Samuel Wyatt Curson is my grandson. He is 12 years old and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. For the month of June, he is in my care. Together we decided to spend as much of the month as possible exploring North Carolina.
We started off in the west, traveling the Blue Ridge Parkway, picnicking on Mount Pisgah, and sliding down the well-named Sliding Rock. Earlier we had explored the grounds of the Carl Sandburg Farm in Flat Rock and Jump Off Rock in Hendersonville.
At the end of the month, we hope to travel up the eastern coast, with a visit to the battleship USS North Carolina and the Outer Banks. Sam tells me that somewhere between them, on the Pamlico Sound is the small town of Bath, where the notorious pirate Blackbeard hid his treasure. We will take a look!
But this week our destination was Greensboro.
“I wonder why people come to Greensboro,” a long-time resident (and close personal friend) said to me when I told him we were coming. But he obviously forgot about Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, commemorating the 1781 battle between revolutionary forces under the command of Nathaniel Greene and the British Regulars led by Charles Cornwallis. When it was all over, the British controlled the field of battle but had to retreat due to the high number of casualties; thus began his journey to Yorktown and the end of the war.
It is a beautiful park, full of monuments, walking trails, and thick woods: a perfect place for a boy and his grandfather to toss the football and dream of NFL glory (or maybe just making the junior high team this fall).
Close by is the Greensboro Science Center, and Sam tagged that as of first importance in our excursion to this city.
Equal in significance to this site of freedom’s struggle is another noteworthy place, downtown on Elm Street, at the once-bustling store with the once-famous name F. W. Woolworth. Founded in 1879 in New York City, Woolworth’s set the pattern for a century of five-and-dime stores that populated every city and town in America. After decades of struggle, the chain closed these stores and opened others, including the now popular Foot Locker.
But that Woolworth store on Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina, is now a museum; because in the winter of 1961 four freshmen men from the nearby North Carolina A&T College (now University) took their places in history as they selected a seat at the lunch counters that ran along the north and west sides of the public dining room.
The segregated public dining room.
It was the days of Jim Crow in Greensboro, North Carolina. Black people were welcome to work behind the counter and shop throughout the store; which they did. But they were not allowed to sit with the white folk and order coffee, lunch, or dessert.
The sit-in on February 1, 1961, drew the attention of local people; and a photographer from the newspaper enticed the four students, all nicely dressed, to pose for pictures, on the front sidewalk, at the close of the day. The photograph was printed around the country and generated national attention.
Thus began the famous lunch counter sit-in that lasted from February to July. It sparked a national movement that involved more than 70,000 lunch counter demonstrators, led Woolworth’s to change their food service policy, and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
That famous dining hall is intact, complete with placards advertising turkey dinner for 65 cents or coffee and tea for 15 cents. The two perpendicular rows of swivel lunch counter stools stand motionless. We were the only people in the exhibit. There was no sound.
Elsewhere in this International Civil Rights Center and Museum we looked at larger than life images of people, some famous and some forgotten. On one wall full of arrest records was the picture, name, address, and charge for one John Moody of Washington DC. He was born in 1931. Maybe he is still alive.
We sat and watched most of a long video in which curators introduced the rooms of the museum, each dedicated to a specific sphere: commerce, transportation, education, religion, law. Jim Crow was an ugly and ungodly reality in America; its negative impact lingers today.
I was eleven years old when the sit-in galvanized the energies of a nation; Sam is now twelve, listening intently, looking closely, learning deeply, asking the questions that prove he will be a more discerning person that I was at his age.
And I thank God.
(June 2021)
