About Civil Rights Greensboro

Civil Rights Greensboro provides access to archival resources documenting the modern civil rights era in Greensboro, North Carolina, from the 1940s to the early 1980s. During this formative period, Greensboro was an epicenter of activity, continuing a tradition that traces its roots back to the 19th century when members of the area's large Quaker population provided stops on the Underground Railroad.

Greensboro is widely cited as the birthplace of the sit-in movement in America, due to the actions of four North Carolina A&T College students at the Woolworth's lunch counter on February 1, 1960. The city was also the scene of several other history-making events in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as well as lesser known activities and issues in the struggle for social justice and equal treatment in public accommodations, schools, housing, politics, and employment. Civil Rights Greensboro documents many of these through historical materials such as correspondence, reports, speeches, photographs, newspaper clippings, and oral histories held at five cultural heritage institutions in North Carolina.

In addition to new transcripts created for the project, Civil Rights Greensboro also houses approximately 125 oral history transcripts that formerly comprised the Greensboro VOICES website.

Project contributors:

Civil Rights Greensboro currently contains digital copies of materials held at six archival repositories and libraries in North Carolina:

• UNCG: Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives
• Guilford College: The Friends Historical Collection 
• Greensboro College: The Brock Historical Museum
• Duke University: Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
• Greensboro History Museum
• Greensboro Public Library

Materials available on this website are selections from various collections at each of these institutions. While no collection has been digitized in its entirety, all the collections represented in CRG contain items which document some aspect of the struggle for civil rights in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Project team:

• Cat McDowell, Principal Investigator
• Ginny Daley, Original Project Manager
• David Gwynn, Second Project Manager
• Rebecca Boger, Digitization and Metadata Technician
• Kerry Bannen, Digitization and Metadata Technician
• Rob Bixby, Digitization and Metadata Technician

Funding:

This project was supported by grant funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the federal Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.