City council members voted 6-3 to loan the International Civil Rights Center and Museum $1.5 million.
Council members Zack Matheny, Tony Wilkins and T. Dianne Bellamy-Small voted against the loan.
Since its opening on Feb. 1, 2010 the profits of the museum have plummeted. The year it opened, 1.6 million dollars were donated by organizations and citizens. Donations have dropped to about $270,000 annually.
The museum must provide the council with audit paperwork from the past three years before any money is given.
“We have a building that has some 30 million dollars worth of tax credit debt on it. In three years that tax credit debt goes to zero” said Greensboro Mayor Robbie Perkins.
Perkins believes one hundred years from now, the Sit-In will be a more impactful movement than it is today.
“If we can preserve the operations, that’s the key to having a paid for facility in our downtown in three years,” Perkins said. “It’s foolish just to let it go.”
Located on 134 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro, the center sits on the original location of a national movement. In the F.W. Woolworth “whites only” lunch counter in 1960, four A&T freshmen sparked the sit-in movement around the nation.
Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr. and David Richmond decided to sit in Woolworth’s on that cold Feb. 1 afternoon until it closed all the while being refused service just because they were African American.
Chairman and co-founder of the ICRCM, Melvin “Skip” Alston sees the positive in the new changes before he resigns.
“I think that overhaul will be good not only for the Civil Rights Museum, but it will also give us new vision…That’s what I was hoping we would be able to have going forth. We also need to have new people to help guide us,” Alston told the WFMY channel 12 news.
That is just what the city plans to do. In addition to the loan, the museum board will now include Perkins and the city manager Denise Turner Roth.
“The leadership of the museum has tried everything or else they wouldn’t come to us,” Perkins said. “There are certain things you have to do just because it’s the right thing and this is one of those times.”
As the site of one of the most significant historical events in Greensboro, Perkins believes it is not a question of whether the museums financial struggles are going to be solved but instead how it’s going to be solved.
“We have to work together as a community to do that,” said Perkins. “Broadening the outreach of how we market to the 75,000 visitors is one solution.”
With a purpose to ensure that people will remember the courage displayed by four freshmen who are commonly known as the Greensboro Four or A&T Four, college students and youth in Greensboro, in the south and around the country.
The efforts of all who joined them led to the desegregation of the Woolworth lunch counter and ultimately to the smashing of segregation in the southern United States. The museum will continue.
“Our society is better if we use our diversity,” the mayor said. “We’ve got wonderful strengths and talents because we have so many different people and as a cornerstone of our downtown, that’s what makes Greensboro great.”
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- ZIRIS SAVAGE Register Reporter