International Civil Rights Center & Museum

International Civil Rights Center & Museum

The International Civil Rights Center & Museum is an archival center, collecting museum and teaching facility devoted to the international struggle for civil and human rights. The Museum celebrates the nonviolent protests of the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins that served as a catalyst in the civil rights movement.

Docent-led and self-guided tours are available for a fee. Tours begin in the lower level where visitors are introduced to the segregated society of the 1960s through video presentations and continues with a graphic "Hall of Shame" display of the violence against civil rights protesters of all colors throughout the United States.

Visitors are introduced to the four students through a reenactment of the planning session set against the original furniture from their dorm room at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in 1960.

Visitors are led into the main floor of the museum where the massive lunch counter, in the original 1960 L-shaped configuration, occupies nearly the whole width and half the length of the building. Original signage from 1960 and dumbwaiters that delivered food from the upstairs kitchen are included, as is a reenactment of the sit-in on life-sized video screens.

Visitors are then led through a reproduction of the "Colored Entrance" at the Greensboro Rail Depot where the roles of the church, schools, politics, and courts in the civil rights movement are explored.

Artifacts include a pen used to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the uniform of a Tuskegee Airman native to Greensboro, and a complete Ku Klux Klan robe and hood.