CLF | Civil Rights Museum Tour
The February One Monument on the campus of North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, N.C., stands a memorial to the courage, sacrifice and commitment four N.C. A&T freshmen (Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr. and David Richmond) demonstrated on February 1, 1960. On that cold, first day of February, these young men sat down at the "whites only" lunch counter and ignited America's sit-in movement.
Council Member Mike Brown explores the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina with seven youngmen participants from Spartanburg Community District One explaining the importance of the Sit-In movement and the history of the civil rights movement.
Negro Motorist Green Book
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide that listed lodgings, tailors and other businesses that welcomed black patrons during Jim Crow.
The guide, which was launched in 1936 and published for nearly 30 years, found a readership because while blacks knew which businesses were friendly in their hometowns, it could be difficult to discern which restaurants, beauty shops and night clubs were off-limits or hostile when they were on the road.
Civil rights leader Julian Bond tells NPR's Neal Conan that he remembers his family using the Green Book "to travel in the South, to find out where we could stop to eat, where we could spend the night in a hotel or in somebody's home."
Bond, who served as chairman of the NAACP for 11 years, says that though the cover was green, that's not where the book got its name.
"It's actually named after the man who started the Green Book, whose name was Green," he says.
Bond explains that Green was a postal worker "who used his contacts in the postal workers union to find out where black people could stay" around the U.S.
At its height, Bond says, the book covered all 50 states, as well as a few countries.
"It didn't matter where you went — Jim Crow was everywhere then," he says, "and black travelers needed this badly."
