The Sit-In City, Fifty Years On

The building at the corner of South Elm Street and February One Place in downtown Greensboro is the same building where the Greensboro sit-ins began. The Art Deco facade, the large plate-glass windows, the bones of the structure, all of it is the building that the F. W. Woolworth Company opened in nineteen thirty-nine as the largest and most modern Woolworth store in the South.

The International Civil Rights Center and Museum opened on February first, two thousand ten. The original lunch counter is preserved where it was. The stools are original. If you stand in that room, you are standing in the room.

North Carolina A&T and Bennett College are still four blocks apart. A&T has grown to more than fifteen thousand students, the largest historically Black college or university in the United States. Bennett has survived financial crises that threatened its closure, including a funding shortfall in two thousand eighteen that nearly ended its accreditation. It emerged from those crises still operating, still one of only two women's historically Black colleges in the country.

The five people killed at Morningside Homes in nineteen seventy-nine have a historical marker near the site. The men who killed them were never imprisoned. The city that apologized in two thousand twenty did not restore the victims to life or the money to the survivors or the years to the people who spent decades waiting for an acknowledgment.

What remains is the record. The counter. The four stools at the Smithsonian. The marker at Morningside Homes. The names: Ezell Blair Junior, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond. Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones, Charles Best. Cesar Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandra Neely Smith, James Waller.

Greensboro is a city that did the work. It is also a city that is still reckoning with what the work cost.