From the 1937-38 Carolina Theatre boycott to the 1960 Sit-ins and into the 21st century, the Gate City has been home to many important protest actions. This year’s Juneteenth Bike Tour visits civil rights protest sites around Downtown Greensboro to explore how people have marched and organized against inequality. Join us on an easy guided tour appropriate for most levels of riders.
Tour departs 9:30 am and returns to museum by 11 am. Check-in opens at 9 am.
Free tour, but registration is required and spots are limited. Register through Bicycling in Greensboro by June 20 at 10 pm
Bikes: Bring your own bike! Or reserve a free/discounted bike to use by filling out this form: Reserve a bike to borrow. Reservations for bicycles will be open until Wednesday, June 18th. If you have reserved a bike to borrow, please arrive at 8:30 am on June 21st.
Helmets: Helmets are required. If you don’t have a helmet of your own, one can be provided. Please let us know beforehand at Nicole.Lindahl@BikeGSO.org
Participants are required to sign a waiver on the day of the event.
Photo: Felipe Troncoso/Greensboro History Museum
Explore the galleries and meet costumed interpreters portraying activists and public figures including suffragist Gertrude Weil, civil rights attorney J. Kenneth Lee, and Gov. William R. Davie, a signer of the U.S. Constitution. Free tours leave every 10-15 minutes from the museum lobby.
Lifted Voices is a series of living history programs that bring to life people and stories from Greensboro’s past. This is a free, family-friendly program. Join us for history in first person.
Greensboro History Museum’s Flashback family fun series highlights decades past for our city and beyond. Recent Flashbacks have explored the history, music, culture, and curiosities of the 1920s, 1940s, and 1950s. This year we’re diving into the decade of disco, punk, and funk with a wild ride through the 1970s. 
We’ll have vintage autos and vintage fashions on view, summer camp game antics, and expert flash talks on 1970s history on local campuses and around the area.
Visitors can enter a Celebs & Sci-Fi costume contest (see below for categories and guidelines) or submit your bakes to our judges’ scrutiny for the 70s Bake Off (recipes below).
Plus get down to the tunes of the era, and grab a tasty bite at Hot Dog Central or Scoop Zone food trucks.
Flashback Activities
Become a Flashback Sponsor
Help us keep Flashback free and fun for all! Your gift of $70 to $1,975 can support the soulful sounds, fashion show, campy games, classic cars, flash talks, and more. Click Here to Support or Download the 2025 Sponsorship Packet
Photo: 1976 Kirkwood neighborhood July 4th parade (GHM Archives)
Sat. 9/14 1 pm-3 pm
7th-12th graders! Learn about leadership & voting while earning service hours. Part of the Smithsonian National Youth Summit.
Interested teens and their families can drop by the Youth Summit Open House at the museum to pick up Youth Summit passports and get stamps with onsite activities, including Social Media & Politics: An Interactive Conversation from NC Cooperative Extension starting at 2 pm.
Sat. 8/28 6 pm-7:30 pm
Join us for a special evening with Martha S. Jones, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History.
The book explores how Black women fought for voting rights and representation long before and after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In it, she draws on her own family connections to Bennett College and her grandmother’s work to support voter education campaigns here in the Gate City.
This 2024 Dortch Endowment Event is free and open to the public. Signing to follow talk with copies for sale from Scuppernong Books.
The Dortch Endowment was established in 1985 in memory of Greensboro attorney John Johnson Dortch to enhance the museum’s offerings for the community with engaging programs, each with ties to regional history and museum collections. This program is also made possible thanks to the generous support of the Women’s Professional Forum Foundation of Greensboro.
About Martha S. Jones
Professor Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.
Professor Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), selected as one of Time’s 100 must-read books for 2020. Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award (best book in civil rights history), the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize (best book in American legal history), the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award (best book in Anglo-American legal history) and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Professor Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essays.
Professor Jones is a public historian, writing for broader audiences at the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is an exhibition curator for “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” at the William L. Clements Library, and an expert consultant for museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.)
Professor Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law which bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa in 2019. Prior to her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University.
Professor Jones is an immediate past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards of the Society of American Historians, the National Women’s History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Journal of African American History and Slavery & Abolition.
About Vanguard (from the publisher)
“An elegant and expansive history” (New York Times) of African American women’s pursuit of political power—and how it transformed America
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more—who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.
Now revised to discuss the election of Vice President Kamala Harris and the vital contributions of Black women in the 2020 elections, Vanguard is essential reading for anyone who cares about the past and future of American democracy.
Mon. 10/21 6 pm- 7:30 pm
Greensboro History Museum and Greensboro Public Library presents author Aran Shetterly and Executive Director of Human Rights at City of Greensboro, Dr. Love Jones, for a conversation about his new book, MORNINGSIDE: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City’s Soul. The book compiles years of research and is an intimate and heart-stopping account that draws upon survivor interviews, court documents, and the files from one of the largest investigations in FBI history. It explores some of the persistent mysteries of the case and the contradictions about race and class.
Many in Greensboro remember the 1979 tragedy that divided our city, as well as its impact on the nation. On November 3, 1979, as activist Nelson Johnson assembled people for a march adjacent to Morningside Homes, gunshots rang out. A caravan of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis sped from the scene, leaving behind five dead. Known as the “Greensboro Massacre,” the event and its aftermath encapsulate the racial conflict, economic anxiety, clash of ideologies, and toxic mix of corruption and conspiracy that roiled American democracy then—and threaten it today.
When the shooters are acquitted in the courts, Reverend Johnson, his wife Joyce, and their allies, at odds with the police and the Greensboro establishment, sought alternative forms of justice. As the Johnsons rebuilt their lives after 1979, they found inspiration in Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Martin Luther King Jr’s concept of Beloved Community and insist that only by facing history’s hardest truths can healing come to the city they refuse to give up on.
A quintessentially American story, Morningside explores the courage required to make change and the evolving pursuit of a more inclusive and equal future.
Free program. Book signing to follow, with copies for sale from Scuppernong Books.
Fri. 6/21 12 pm-1 pm
Join us for a conversation with UNC Chapel Hill professor Heidi Kim exploring Japanese American experiences in North Carolina during World War II, a time when the government incarcerated more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry across the United States.
Free Program. Register to join on Zoom
[button link=”https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UHBEbMWVRNGLHUVN2nuteg#/registration”]Register[/button]
Or watch live on the Greensboro History Museum Facebook page
Thurs. 6/27 6 pm-7 pm
Join us for a conversation with historian Charles C. Bolton. His new book, Home Front Battles, explores the role of race in World War II mobilization in the Deep South, where the needs of wartime industries and bases inflamed tensions around labor, land, and military service.
Charles C. Bolton is Professor of History and former Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of many books on Southern history, including Poor Whites of the Antebellum South, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980, and William F. Winter and the New Mississippi.
Learn more about the book here
Thur. 9/19 5:30 pm- 8 pm
Thursday, Sept. 19. Head down the rabbit hole into the wild history of political campaigning across the decades with games, drinks and fun activities.
Jon Grinspan, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, is the special guest at Campaign Madness. This GHM After Hours event also features fun, games and adult beverages for sale as guests go down the rabbit hole to explore the wild history of political campaigning across the decades.
Grinspan will be discussing his new book Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War. The book is a propulsive account of American history’s most surprising, most consequential political club: the Wide Awake anti-slavery youth movement that marched America from the 1860 election to civil war. Publishers Weekly calls Wide Awake “an insightful and moving analysis of how America descended into civil war.”
Doors open at 5:30 pm with a cash bar, democracy games, and a scavenger hunt in the museum exhibitions. The conversation with Jon Grinspan starts at 6:30 pm with book signing to follow. Copies will be available for purchase from Scuppernong Books.
Free and open to the public.
Jon Grinspan is Curator of Political History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He is the author of the award-winning The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the 19th Century. He frequently contributes to the New York Times, and has been featured in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, D.C.
MORE ABOUT THE BOOK
At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes–mostly working-class Americans in their twenties–became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there.
In this gripping narrative, Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan examines how exactly our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. Perfect for readers of Lincoln on the Verge and TheField of Blood, Wide Awake bears witness to the power of protest, the fight for majority rule, and the defense of free speech. At its core, Wide Awake illuminates a question American democracy keeps posing, about the precarious relationship between violent speech and violent actions.
Historian, author, and filmmaker Malinda Maynor Lowery on “The Lumbees’ Long Fight to Reimagine Democracy.”
Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. In July 2021 she joined Emory University as the Cahoon Family Professor of American History, after spending 12 years at UNC-Chapel Hill and 4 years at Harvard University. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, was published by UNC Press in 2018. Lowery has also published essays in the New York Times, Oxford American, and Daily Yonder. She produced the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (PBS, 2013-2018) and Somewhere South (PBS, 2020), and other award-winning programs, as well as Sundance Film Festival entries Real Indian (1996) and Sounds of Faith (1997). Lumbeeland, her latest short film project, is scheduled for release in 2024. Learn more about her work at https://www.malindalowery.com/
Exhibit on view now
Also participating in the program are Jennifer Revels Baxter, Executive Director of Guilford Native American Association (GNAA), the state’s first urban Indian organization; Dr. Greg O’Brien, chair of the Department of History at UNC Greensboro and co-editor of The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies (University of Nebraska Press, 2017); Nora Dial-Stanley, Chair of the GNAA Board of Directors; and Stephen Bell, American Indian Education coordinator for Guilford County Schools. Scuppernong Books will have copies of The Lumbee Indians available for purchase and signing after the talk.
Free program. Presented in partnership with Guilford Native American Association and UNC Greensboro Department of History.
The John Floy Wicker Endowment supports Greensboro History Museum’s public programming with an annual event. Wicker was a Greensboro architect whose works include Friendly Shopping Center and Page High School.