The crackle of electricity was discernible as soon as our bus pulled into the parking lot of Shiloh Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here was ground zero in the Civil Rights Movement, where four students from North Carolina A&T College purchased notebooks and pens at the downtown Woolworth's, and then stunned the staff there by taking seats at the lunch counter. The day was February 1, 1960, a date as famous to Greensboro--and America--as any date in history.
Standing on the grounds of Shiloh, the center of movement activity in those days, as people arrived eager to relate their civil rights experiences, it felt very much like a place awash in the richest, most poignant of American experiences. What happened in Greensboro spread like wildfire to black--and some white--college students across the country. Corene Blair's son, Ezell Blair, Jr., a freshman at A&T, became one of the four students to take seats at the Woolworth's that day. The night before, Ezell gave her a hint of what was to come: "Mother, we're going to do something tomorrow that's going to shake up the nation."
After 10 years of planning, and $12 million in fundraising, the old Woolworth's store will reopen next year as an international civil rights museum, preserving "the physical evidence of what happened here," observed Guilford County Commissioner Skip Alston.
The stories continue to engage and stun. Registered nurse Doxie Whitfield, born in High Point, recalled the first day of legal integration at Grady Hospital in Atlanta in 1965, when she was assigned to care for a white woman just out of surgery. The woman's husband took one look at the African American nurse and declared, "Get your hands off my wife!" Enraged, the man lifted up the 90-pound Whitfield and bodily threw her out of the room. "I rolled like a ball down the hallway," Whitfield recalled, "my hat still on my head, dress up. It was real humiliating. Nobody said or did anything. I picked myself up, determined to care for her." The woman's husband snatched the hospital tubes from his wife's body, stuffed her into a wheelchair, and removed her from Grady. About three weeks later, the man returned to the hospital. Whitfield braced herself, expecting more trouble.
"He told me he was sorry for putting his hands on me. His wife had died because no other hospital would take her because of the way he had removed her. As a result, he didn't have a wife, and his kids didn't have a mother."
