(rshsdepot) Greensboro, NC

[Bernie Wagenblast <brwagenblast_@_comcast.net>]

Links:
http://www.greensborolibrary.org/downtown/pics22.htm (1st Southern Railway
Passenger depot - built 1899)
http://www.greensborolibrary.org/downtown/pics24.htm (Southern Railway
station noted in story)

Station donates segregation-era sign

4-14-02

By JIM SCHLOSSER, Staff Writer
News & Record


GREENSBORO -- After more than 40 years, daylight has shone again on a sign
that represents a dark period in the city's past.

Workmen at the old the Southern Railway station on East Washington Street
recently ripped away a piece of sheet metal and exposed the words "colored
entrance," etched in limestone.

One of the last visual reminders in Greensboro of the Jim Crow era of
segregation, the sign was above the entrance to what was once the station's
black waiting room.

The sign has been removed and given to the Greensboro Historical Museum.
Eventually, the museum plans to use it in a display about race relations.

Signs directing black people and white people to separate bathrooms, water
fountains, waiting rooms and entrances once were as common as kudzu in the
South. The signs vanished once segregation ended. Many were made of cheap
metal and wound up in scrap heaps. When one of these racial relics turns up,
collectors offer high prices.

The station sign survived "because it was built into the side of the
building," says Jon Zachman, the museum's curator of collections. "It was
part of the facade."

The city is renovating the Southern Railway station as a transportation
center for trains, buses and cabs. Opened in 1927 and designed by a New York
architectural firm, the station was one of the largest and most ornate in
the state. White passengers used a center entrance flanked by soaring
columns. They waited for trains in a large waiting room with a vaulted
ceiling and a giant map of Southern Railway passenger train routes.

Black travelers had to enter through a side door to a separate black waiting
room that was spacious but unadorned.

Two blocks from the station, another Jim Crow sign remains above the door of
a building on the Bennett College campus. It says "Carnegie Negro Library,"
engraved in concrete.

Even though the building ceased being a library in the 1960s, college
officials decided to leave the original sign uncovered to memorialize a site
that had been an important educational and meeting place for the black
community during segregation.

In 2000, a crew renovating the old Kress 5 & 10 store on South Elm Street
found a door with "Colored Men" on it. The building's owners donated the
former restroom door to the International Civil Rights Museum being
developed in the old Woolworth's dime-store building. The 1960 sit-ins that
hastened segregation's end happened at the whites-only lunch counters in the
Woolworth's and Kress buildings.

Eresterine Guidry of High Point, a collector of black memorabilia, says
original signs from segregation have become so rare that reproductions must
be manufacturered. Her kitchen has a reproduction of one she encountered as
a child: "We serve colored. Carry out only."

She doubts if many forgotten racist signs remain in old buildings because
"people go into those places looking for them."

Southern Railway, now Norfolk Southern Railroad, closed the station in 1979
and donated it to the city. The "Colored Entrance" sign had been covered
years earlier because it was offensive. Besides, the old black waiting room
had new uses, including the home of the local model railroad club.

In removing the sign, workers found the 15 letters extended over three
pieces of limestone, weighing more than 400 pounds. Each slab was placed on
an antique Southern Railway baggage cart that museum officials discovered in
the station. Cart and sign now occupy space in a dark museum storage
facility flanked by old Singer sewing machines and other relics.

The sign will remain there until the museum completes and implements a new
master plan for displays interpreting the city's history.

A new entrance sign will be needed at the station. Once the transportation
center is fully completed, the former black waiting room will serve as the
waiting room for all train passengers.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 373-7081 or jschlosser_@_news-record.com


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The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

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End of RSHSDepot Digest V1 #345
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=================================
The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org