The International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, has announced that it plans to establish a new exhibit entitled “Pride of the HBCU.” The planned exhibit will highlight the role students and faculty at HBCUs played in the civil rights movement. John Swaine, CEO of the museum, said “our plan is to reach out to every HBCU and ask that these priceless institutions share their history and provide memorabilia to be included in the exhibit.”
The museum is seeking photographs, historical documents, textbooks, classroom materials, paraphernalia and other mementos from the civil rights period. “We simply cannot place a value on how much our historically Black colleges and universities have contributed to students, families, and communities, across the nation as part of the civil rights movement,” Swaine said.
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum is located in the 1929 F.W. Woolworth building where in 1960 students from historically Black North Carolina A&T State University began the lunch counter sit-in movement which spread throughout the South and was a catalyst for other civil rights protests and demonstrations.
