(World News Trust) -- About once a year, and I am remiss to not remind us all of this more often than once a year, I think about the International Civil Rights Museum on Elm St., in Greensboro, North Carolina. I am remiss because this museum has been an idea and has remained an idea only for many years. That fact alone shows that Greensboro and the state of North Carolina, and for that matter, the U.S. government which funds most museums, stands on a position that a civil rights museum is not worth funding.
Even the chancellor of Germany recently spoke in Israel and apologized for the way Germany acted under Hitler and personally apologized to the people whose families were affected and also made comments saying that the people who helped those being persecuted were right to stand up when they did to help the downtrodden. This is something that neither the state of North Carolina, nor the leaders of Greensboro, have done to make the International Civil Rights Museum a reality.
Feb. 1, 1960, an event that changed America, thankfully, occurred in Greensboro, N.C.. Four young black men sat down at the "whites only" counter at a Woolworth's on Elm St. and were not served food even though they were hungry. There was no confrontation by the store management, but there was also no food served to the four men. The four men stayed, and sat and did not leave and this event became the "sit in movement" This is significant because it was the defining moment in which blacks stood up to the ridiculous segregation of their people for the right to eat and have the same rights as any other ethnic group in America. Their standing up by sitting down was a smack in the face of the racial intolerance that was rampant in the USA and a true blemish in what the USA is supposed to stand for. I was brought up to believe, and still do, that we live in a democratic country where we are free and all citizens are equal -- all in all I find these things being quietly taken away, little by little, but that is another story...
It took nearly 100 years after the ratification of the United States gaining its independence from England and nearly another 100 years after that before the rights of humans of African descent in the USA were becoming recognized. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration Of Independence. What most folks do not realize is that when America was founded, it left slavery as a practice to be determined by future generations. That fact left blacks and other ethnic groups to be looked down upon as well as treating groups that were not white, or for that matter certain kinds of white because the Irish were persecuted when they first arrived in the USA, be a practice that was tolerated for generation upon generation. Racial and cultural intolerance was the common practice in America even though America was founded under a revolution because the citizens of the USA were persecuted by England -- Thus the great hypocrisy began.
But even though this went on, today we stand at a crossroads in which a half African, literally, and half white man may become the President of the United States of America. But even though that is the case, the civil rights for blacks and other groups of humans either here in the USA or abroad is of great importance, yet there is no museum that represents the people who have been treated wrongfully over time. The Holocaust museum exists in Washington, D.C. and it represents the Jewish holocaust from World War Two and rightfully exists as it should so that something like that should never be forgotten, an and also exists to teach the next generations that certain actions will lead to horrifying outcomes. Millions of blacks were mistreated in the four hundred years since America was founded. Their story should not only be remembered, but their experience needs to be shown to the world as retribution for the torture, deaths, rapes, mistreatments, and all other indignities and pidgeon-holing their race has endured under American rule. Greensboro is just one small dumb town that the things I am mentioning happened and they are not responsible for all of the travesties, but the sit in movement began there and it began there because Greensboro fell in line and did not stop being wrong to blacks until four young men went to a Woolworth's for lunch. And yes I am trivializing that by saying it ended there because it did not as the museum still sits in a state of flux, never being opened for tourism, never being finished, and never being truly funded for the benefit of the people for which it represents, but the city itself and the many who would flock to it for the knowledge that going to museums provide either. Individuals may apologize for the sit in movement, the mistreatment of blacks and so on but the museum that would attract tourists to the city of Greensboro remains a storefront that is a museum in name only.
Sadly, the International Civil Rights museum, a place that would allow Greensboro to get past its past, is not a place for students of all ages to go yet. Greensboro suffers to this day as it still has no centerpiece for attracting new businesses or tourism, and the backing of the museum would turn their city around if they would only recognize this fact. There is a website for the education about the exact events and what the plan is, but no one in what is supposed to be the greatest country in the world has seen it a good enough idea to bring the dream of a museum that represents the story of the civil rights movement, a great lengthy part of of American history, to fruition.There have been donations, there have been representations, and there have been many to stand up to wish for the International Civil Rights Museum to become a place for us all as Americans to go and reflect in what this country is not supposed to act like, but apparently no entity with the money to fund such a reality has been mature enough to recognize this as one of the greatest needs in our constantly healing development of racial and religious inequities.
The story of the sit in movement can be found at sitinmovement.org
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T.P. McWhorter was born Talbot Porter McWhorter in Jefferson City Missouri on July 23rd, 1941. He was born the fourth of seven children including two brothers and four sisters. McWhorter's father, Leopold, the first born son of Scottish immigrants, was a railroad man who travelled up and down Missouri train lines making repairs and handled upkeep for the lines throughout the state.
Leopold fought in WWI as a foot soldier for the United States from the beginning of the war to sometime in 1917. It was during that time he developed the skill of engineering to become a railroad technician. By the time T.P. was born, Leopold was not home much and McWhorter's mother mostly raised T.P. and rest of the the family and took care of their small farm. McWhorter's mother, Katerina, was born in the Ukraine and met Leopold after WWI in Philadelphia in 1925 when Leopold was working for the railroad there. Besides running the small farm where they raised a couple of cattle, chickens and some sheep for family food, Katerina worked as a washer woman who was brought the clothes of the local upper class residents of Jefferson City. She was well-loved around the town, and Leopold was the most respected train technician that ever worked on the line. Both died tragically during a weekend vacation when their climbing harness rope snapped while the two were shackled together on the sheer face of a small mountain in Colorado. They fell nearly a thousand feet before they hit the ground.
It was T.P.'s oldest sister, Griselda, who became the head of the family after news of the parents' demise reached the farm by telegram. T.P. was emotionally crushed at not being able to say goodbye to his mother whom he was always close to. He developed obsessive compulsive behavior including repetitive handwashing remeniscent of Howard Hughes, and the paranoid agoraphobic behavior that confined Jim Backus to his home for years. Writing became T.P.'s world where he lost himself in pages of unending fantasy. T.P.'s stories of imaginary worlds, characters that were riddled with obsessions and addictions, dominated the boy's life for seven years before he was forced from his home when Griselda sold the family farm out of selfishness to spend money on fancy clothes and shoes.
After the farm was sold, T.P. and his two brothers moved into a small house. His brothers supported him as he still remained an agoraphobic obsessive hand-washer, and soon developed other paranoid delusional behaviors that included a great fear of transforming into anything other than who he was already, which is symptomatic of the hand-washing compulsion, and also a hatred for odd numbers. It was only when his brother Utgrad came home drunk one night and fell asleep smoking and the house caught fire that snapped T.P. back to reality after he saved Utgrad and his other brother Remo from their imminent deaths. Like being splashed with water while in a daze, the fire was a wake-up call to T.P. and he immediately lost all of his compulsions as he embraced life to the fullest and became an adventurer, traveller, and writer. For the last several years, T.P. has been living on the island of Malta writing short stories and doing archeological digs trying to uncover the link between the Maltese people and the mythical island of Atlantis.