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.
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.
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.
GHM is thrilled to co-sponsor a program exploring the growing influence of independent voters with experts from across the country organized by UNCG Lloyd International Honors College next Tuesday, September 12 at 6 pm in the Elliott University Center Auditorium.
Free admission!
Celebrated historian Fergus M. Bordewich discusses his new book KLAN WAR: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction at the Greensboro History Museum for the annual Dortch series. Panel discussion with UNC Greensboro professors Mark Elliott and Deborah H. Barnes follows.
Free event. Books for sale from Scuppernong Books.
Bordewich is the author of eight previous nonfiction books including Congress at War, The First Congress, and America’s Great Debate. In Klan War, he looks at the rise of the white supremacist terrorist organization immediately following the Civil War and the battles undertaken at federal and state levels to combat horrific acts against newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, including in North Carolina.
Joining Bordewich for the panel discussion will be Dr. Mark Elliott, Professor of History at UNCG and author of Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. Also on the panel is Dr. Deborah Barnes, Visiting Lecturer in UNCG’s African American & African Diaspora Studies Program and member of the steering committee for the Guilford County Community Remembrance Project. Greensboro History Museum Curator of Collections Ayla Amon will moderate.
This program is made possible by the museum’s Dortch Memorial Endowment, created in memory of John Johnson Dortch (1930-1984) by the attorneys and staff of his law firm, now Fox Rothschild LLP. It is in support of the History Museum’s award-winning exhibition NC Democracy: Eleven Elections, which explores the election of 1868 and ten other contests that shaped what democracy means in our state today.
Ishmael Titus was one of the Black Patriots who took part in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781 with honor and sacrifice. Centuries later, his descendants have researched and worked to uncover his story. Join us for this free program to learn more about the experiences of enslaved and free people of color at Guilford Courthouse, and about the sources family and professional historians are drawing on to bring those stories to light. The program has been developed as a collaboration between Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, Greensboro Public Library, and the Greensboro History Museum. We are celebrating #NationalLibraryWeek and #NationalParkWeek.
This program will also stream on the Greensboro Public Library’s Facebook page
It is free, but registration is suggested. To register, email Beth Sheffield.
FREE PROGRAM
It’s a night of fun and games plus serious Expert Takes around gerrymandering in NC. Discover what’s behind electoral redistricting with experts from across the state. Try your hand at our Gerrymander Madness VR experience and enjoy a live onstage game show. Plus, live jazz duo from UNCG Miles Davis Jazz Studies Program, adult beverages for sale from Little Brother Brewing, and much much more!
5:30 pm Social time! Beer available for purchase, live jazz duo, VR experience, retro 3-D glasses
6:30 pm Expert Takes panel: What is happening with electoral redistricting in NC, and what we can all do about it.
Featuring Tyler Daye, Policy and Civic Engagement Manager for Common Cause NC; J. Michael Bitzer, Chair of Political Science at Catawba College and author of the book Redistricting and Gerrymandering in North Carolina: Battle Lines in the Tar Heel State; and Jim Clotfelter, UNCG Vice Chancellor Emeritus & Professor of Political Science Emeritus. Moderated by Robby Hassell, Regional Judicial Outreach Liaison · ABA Judicial Division
8:00 pm Gameshow Madness live in the auditorium
NC Democracy: Eleven Elections exhibition and Democracy Games in Connection Point open throughout the evening.
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Want even more…?
Buy a ticket for the Premium Pre-Madness Dinner in Welcome to the Gate City, starting at 5 pm!
Park early. Enjoy a special buffet dinner and wine. Meet our experts. Get reserved auditorium seating for the Expert Takes panel and a madness goody bag.
$50 person or $410 for a reserved table for 8. Reserve and purchase online
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Or call 336-373-2306 for more information.
March is Women’s History Month! Bring your Little Lions to the museum for snacks, selfies and fun with some of Greensboro leading suffragists! Take part in fun activity with local suffragists Laura Weill Cone and Harriet Elliott for pre-K to 3rd graders and their families.