Miles total: 3750
Today, we traveled for several hours to Greensboro, the site of the 1960 sit-ins at the downtown Woolworth's. A statue commemorating the first 4 students to initiate the sit-ins (all from North Carolina A&T) stands prominently on the NCA&T campus. Downtown, the Woolworth's site is being converted into an international Civil Rights museum, although the museum has faced a series of delays over several years, and there is still no opening day in sight.
Throughout the trip, students have been grappling with the role of MLK in the movement. While many of them respect his role as the movement's charismatic leader, they have been to many sites that focus so heavily on him that few other activists are mentioned. Thus it was fitting to meet with Tom Jackson, a scholar at UNC-Greensboro who studies MLK, to get his perspectives on the commemoration of King and how we view King today in terms of his work in the movement. Tom showed us some of his research, which showed that the New York Times published more articles on the assassination of King than it did on all of his work combined from 1960-1968. His talk gave us a lot to think about in terms of the politics of memory and commemoration, the role of the media, and why many local leaders/activists receive little to no mention in the standard Civil Rights narrative.
[My camera is being testy, so here's a shot of the Woolworth's building from last year's course.]
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