Audioguides Greensboro

On February 1, 1960, four Black freshmen from North Carolina A&T walked into the Woolworth's on South Elm Street, sat at the segregated lunch counter, and refused to leave. Within weeks their example had spread to 55 cities across the South. The building now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, and the original lunch counter stools are preserved exactly where the sit-in happened. Greensboro had been a prosperous textile city before that day, but the lunch counter is what gave it its permanent place in history.

The city was founded in 1808 and named for General Nathanael Greene, who fought the Battle of Guilford Court House nearby in 1781 in a clash that so depleted Cornwallis's forces that it ultimately led to the British surrender at Yorktown.

The Blandwood Mansion, built in 1795 and later remodeled in the Tuscan villa style, stands as one of the oldest significant buildings in the Piedmont. Today the downtown stretch of Elm Street retains its architectural bones from the textile boom era, and North Carolina A&T, the HBCU where the Greensboro Four studied, remains a powerful presence in the city's intellectual life.