An hour and
a half drive north-west from Holly Springs took us to several libraries and
ultimately to Greensboro, North Carolina. It was here, on February 1st, 1960,
that four male freshman students of NC- AT University sat down at a segregated,
whites only, lunch counter in the downtown Woolworths and tried to order food.
On July 25, 1960, the
counter was officially de-segregated by the F W Woolworth
Company.
This first
successful sit-in created a snowball effect of others which also began, some
peacefully, and some violently, to integrate many public businesses all over America.
Today that
same Woolworth building, and its entire block of other stores, have been turned
into the International Civil Rights center.
Not unlike
other museums and foundations that have been formed at other historic civil
rights sites around the country which we have visited (See our blog posts on
Little Rock, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee this summer. And our Facebook pics
of January last from Birmingham, Alabama) this facility is centered on the heroic
efforts of a few ordinary people who decide or are called to do extraordinary
things.
While the
exterior and lobby of the museum are able to be photographed the interior is
not. This prohibition includes the
original entire lunch counter inside where for over 6 months college and high
school students, black and then also white, demanded that blacks be served and
segregation be stopped. But photos of the counter are available online.
As one
slogan so aptly said it, “Sometimes you have to stand up for your rights by
sitting down.”
We left
Greensburg and drove to King, NC, where we met Mona’s brother Marty at his
home. He led us over to the King Library
where we met his wife Shelby who was working till near close as a polling
volunteer for North Carolina’s midterm early voting elections. Marty will serve
here in November on the regular voting day.
Since Shelby
had to stay the three of us, joined by Marty’s son John’s motherinlaw, to visit
one of the most unusual houses in America.
There we met John and wife Christie for a tour by Marty.
The house is
called a cabin by Marty, though by any standard it is way too big to be that.
But that was Frank’s plan when he began building it several decades ago. Once
he hand dug the well and enclosed it inside his first roofed four walls, he
just never stopped
adding on.
Built with a
native ingenuity and learned skills by Frank and his brother Oscar, even the
flying beams and pole uprights were cut and placed by hand.
The source
of all the lumber was the Halsabeck farm.
Even before the well Frank bought and moved a portable sawmill onto the
property.
Oscar is in a nursing home today. Frank had a stroke and died two years
ago. Their niece Lindsay inherited the
house and much of the farm and now opens the place up for tours and several
mountain music family events each year. Uncle Frank loved mountain music.
At Frank’s
death he was getting ready to complete an enclosed deck and it looks like he
intended to build in a spa!
We ended our
evening with a trip to the local (really local. There is this one in King and
one other in Stanleyville) DAIRI-O restaurant. Great food, great selection. Ask
Mona what a SLAW DOG is if you don’t know.
Tonight Mona
is catching up on news with brother Marty.
We sleep here and visit tomorrow, then we drive to dinner with niece Lori
and husband David’s family and John and
Christie. We stay at John and Christie’s
for Friday evening before turning south once again, back to FROG.
TOAD is
already shivering a bit in these higher elevations far from the sea. The low
tomorrow here is still projected to drop into the thirties. And snow is coming
to the mountains for the first time this year.
This was
Mona’s favorite find on Facebook today:
-Ken
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