QCT Greensboro Slavery to Civil Rights Tour^sm
Travel Article Spring 2023
Trend Magazine Online™

By Staff

Trend Magazine Online™

A Step Back Into Time!
Re-published from a previous edition with Updates...

On May 1, 2010, Queen City Tours^® and Travel embarked on its first Greensboro Slavery to Civil Rights Tour™. Our day trip started off with a tour of Greensboro, North Carolina from an African-American perspective and was hosted by a local professional guide. Our tour included a drive through the campus of Guilford College which is known as the location of a hiding place where Vestal and Levi Coffin assisted Slaves with passage to the North from 1830 until the end of the Civil War in 1864. It was part of the Underground Railroad network and today there is a marker commemorating this place on West Friendly Avenue.

Also included on the city tour was the Greensboro Cultural Center which is home to the African-American Atelier which showcases local artists, North Carolina A&T State University whose alumni include Black astronaut Ron McNair and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Bennett College for Women, and the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum at the Historic Palmer Institute which is the first historic site to honor an African-American woman.


Lunch was Dutch treat and included a choice of over 20 local restaurants that featured both American and foreign cuisines. The locals, however, suggested that we try the ″finger licking″ barbecued ribs. After lunch, we embarked on the highlight of our day trip which included a tour of the newly opened Civil Rights Museum. The museum is an archival center, collecting museum, and teaching facility devoted to the international struggle for civil and human rights which also celebrate's the nonviolent protests of the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins that sparked the Civil Rights Movement nationwide. The original portion of the lunch counter and stools where the four students sat on Feb. 1, 1960, has never been moved from its original footprint.

Our adventurous day ended with a step back into time when Black people in the United States were considered the property of their owners. We visited the former plantation of tanner Richard Mendenhall located just southwest of Greensboro in Old Jamestown, North Carolina. This 1811 home is in the National Register of Historic Places and features a barn that houses a restored false-bottomed wagon used to transport Slaves during the Underground Railroad Movement from North Carolina to the North.



This tour is presented by Queen City Tours^® and Travel, and sponsored by Trend Magazine Online™. You can join us on this historic and memorable journey by clicking here.