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Barely a year ago, efforts to transform the former F.W. Woolworth Co. building into a world-class civil rights museum faced a huge challenge.

Leaders of the project needed about $12 million in new money to finish construction and begin operating the museum inside an 80-year-old building that - 49 years ago today - hosted one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement.

Enter David Winslow, a Winston-Salem consultant with a statewide reputation for raising money for daunting projects.

"We met and I just asked them what they had done about tax credits. They looked at me and said, 'Tax credits?' " Winslow said recently. "I told them, 'Guys, we're talking about millions of dollars.' "

Tax credits are purchased by private investors who use them to lower their state and federal tax debts.

And Winslow's eye-opening suggestion turned out to be the key that likely will propel the International Civil Rights Center and Museum to completion, commemorating the sit-ins that played such a major role in changing race relations across the United States.

Late last week, the sale of those tax credits netted the project $10 million, and word of the impending windfall helped to attract $4 million more in contributions from a group of local foundations and businesses.

Any money left after the project's completion will be used for its future operating costs, museum officials said.

"We anticipate being under full-scale renovation within the next 30 to 45 days," said state Rep. Earl Jones, one of the November 1993 founders of the nonprofit Sit-In Movement Inc., which owns the building and is supervising its restoration.

Over the years, more than a few Greensboro residents have grown impatient with the project and a 15-year string of optimistic projections, including one that the museum would open as early as 1999, followed by crushed hopes and recriminations along the same racial lines the museum aims to bridge.

But the influx of new money could herald the happy ending of a project with a maddening history of fits and starts.

Bomb shards, a historic chair

The museum promises to be an exciting blend of period artifacts, high-tech media and scholarly research into the history of civil rights in America.

On display will be such items as:

• A chair where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once sat while being arraigned on charges stemming from a civil rights protest.
• A medicine bag used by Dr. George Evans, the first African American physician allowed to practice at what had been an all-white Greensboro hospital.
• A shard of stained glass from the notorious Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., a 1963 act of terrorism that killed four little girls as they prepared to attend Sunday school.

Visitors will begin their journey through the museum in an area that contrasts America's noble guarantees of equality for all against the shameful treatment endured by black residents during the Jim Crow era, showcasing such events as the church bombing.

Then the museum will tell the story of the four N.C. A&T students who in 1960 began the nonviolent protest in Greensboro, using film recreations of the six-month effort that successfully integrated the Woolworth's lunch counter.

Fundraising for the museum has been so successful, netting about $2 million in contributions and multiyear pledges last year, that Sit-In leaders scuttled plans to finish only the museum's first two floors. They now intend to complete the third level as well, including administrative offices, an archives room and meeting space.

'An embarrassment'

But the fact that it has taken so long to bring a project of such obvious merit to fruition does not speak well of Greensboro's ability to pull together and capitalize on its unique history.

"It's just been an embarrassment to the community that it has taken us this long to get it built," said Jim Melvin, president of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation and former mayor whose group contributed $1 million.

Melvin is pledging an unspecified amount of additional money from Bryan coffers: "We're prepared to do whatever we can to get it back under construction this year."

Jones and other Sit-In leaders already raised and spent about $13 million from 1996 to 2008 for construction, design, exhibits, audio visual equipment, fundraising and other office expenses.

Much of that money, about $9 million, has gone into construction of exhibits and the building itself, which had unforeseen foundation problems and was never built to withstand the weight of modern-day heating, cooling and ventilation systems.

Another $727,000 is tied up in projection equipment, production costs and the film footage that will illustrate multimedia exhibits.

The project has been dogged by murmurs from some, mainly white critics, who cite no evidence but assert that some of the money has been misspent or misappropriated.

Those suspicions have been fanned by the fact that Sit-In has raised such jaw-dropping sums of money, operates largely outside the eye of the general public and has gone for long periods without making obvious, significant progress on the project.

Among some of the city's African American residents, there is a corresponding sense the project is taking so long because of latent racism, intransigence by white community leaders and, perhaps, their antipathy toward Jones and Sit-In's equally controversial co-founder, Melvin "Skip" Alston, chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners.

Twice, Greensboro voters have defeated referendums that would have provided money to complete the project.

'Nothing wasteful'

None of the criticism rings true, say project supporters. They attribute the initial time lags to inexperience in museum development and a deliberative pace set by project leaders in its early stages.

Later delays, they say, stem from the structural, foundation and basic design problems discovered five years ago as Sit-In Movement began heavy construction with an overly optimistic goal of opening in 2005.

Mainstream foundations and business leaders stepped forward back then with $4 million when Sit-In estimated that much would be sufficient to finish what its leaders then envisioned as an $8 million project.

Before contributing, local donors did what they would do before writing any big check: They had an accountant examine Sit-In's financial records to verify it was viable and spending its money properly, said Richard "Skip" Moore of the Weaver Foundation. Moore has helped lead the latest effort to raise more money from businesses and area foundations.

"I don't see anything in the project that you could call wasteful or overdone or anything that shouldn't be there," Moore said.

Although the effort to build the museum has been directed throughout by African Americans, Sit-In also has had several white residents on its board including current City Council member Trudy Wade, who served during the 1990s through 2000.

As Sit-In's executive secretary, before she was elected to municipal office, Wade co-signed with Alston a deed of trust in May 1996 that enabled the group to tap $180,250 in federal funds from the city's community development program.

Douglas Harris, a white Greensboro lawyer, has been part of the effort almost since day one after word circulated about how upset he was by Woolworth's decision in October 1993 to close its historic downtown location.

He ate lunch there regularly and could not imagine such a cultural treasure being bulldozed. He soon received a call from Jones asking if he wanted to volunteer in the restoration.

"Of course, I knew what he meant: work for free as an attorney," said Harris, who supports the project so passionately that he and his wife put their home on the line to help Sit-In buy the endangered building.

"We had the closing all set to go, but then the bank decided the collateral wasn't sufficient," Harris said. "So we took out a second mortgage on our house to provide the extra guarantee."

At last, an end in sight

Co-founder Jones said he is not distressed the museum is only now, after 15 years, making final strides toward the finish line. He always knew, Jones said, the museum would take at least 12 to 14 years to complete despite the group's publicly announced goals of opening in 1999 and 2005.

The reason? That's how long it took Memphis and Birmingham, Ala., to open similar memorials to the civil rights era, Jones said.

The museum's previously announced target dates were a source of disagreement among members of Sit-In's board of directors, but they did not make public these differences, Jones said.

"But whenever I was asked about it," Jones said. "I always stuck to the 12- to 14-year schedule."

Actual construction began in 2002, then gathered steam the next year and hit full stride in 2004 when Sit-In spent $2.4 million, according to its federal tax filings.

But that spending was quickly diverted to deal with damage to the aging building from years of water seepage undermining walls that were not sturdy enough for modern use, said Amelia Parker, Sit-In Movement's executive director.

"Because the building is our first artifact, we moved immediately to make sure we were preserving that appropriately," Parker said.

The original budget for such climate-control and waterproofing issues was $600,000, but it cost more than $3 million, she said.

Shoring up the structure involved removing and replacing huge amounts of soil too water-logged to support the elevator shaft and escalator pit, Parker said. Large pylons were driven into the new subsurface to distribute the weight of the elevator shaft and the escalator pit.

Some of roughly $2 million in structural reinforcement that remains to be done will strengthen the roof to bear the weight of modern-day equipment. Features include a fuel-supply network and a back-up power plant to safeguard fragile artifacts of paper and wood by keeping air-control machinery operating if a blackout strikes.

The system is part of what is required for the local museum to affiliate with prestigious Smithsonian Institution, making it eligible to display some of the national museum's renowned cache of historical items.

But even if the Smithsonian weren't involved, Parker said, the local museum would need the equipment - which wasn't included in original plans - to properly protect its own collection.

The price of progress

Sit-In's financial picture, sketched out in federal tax filings, suggests an organization that was run on a shoestring through 2001. Since then, it has faced ramped-up expenses as the project gained complexity and intensity.

The group spent just under $4 million running its office, fundraising and planning programs from January 1998 through December 2007, the latest period for which audited records exist.

The project had very little expense for rental space and utilities until five years ago when the three-person staff had to move out of its office in the former Woolworth's building to make way for construction.

"We had no choice, we had to move out. We were told we could not stay in the building during construction," Parker said of the move to new offices, which increased rent and other "occupancy" costs by 600 percent, from about $8,800 in 1998 to $52,800 during 2007.

The group's rented suite in the U.S. Trust building on North Elm Street provides offices and meeting rooms, but also storage space for the museum's growing collection of documents and other artifacts, Parker said.

Salaries account for a third of Sit-In's overhead during the last decade, about $1.26 million for a staff that now includes Parker, an executive assistant and a coordinator of fundraising and other events. Parker is the only highly compensated employee, earning $100,000 a year for a work week averaging 60 hours.

The lone blemish on Sit-In Movement's official record is a September 2006 report from the State Auditor's office, which questioned some of its money-handling practices and the care with which the project had been planned.

The criticism focused on such oversights as insufficient documentation for some purchases and mentioned "a lack of planning that has led to additional costs for construction and renovation," mainly stemming from the water problems.

Parker said the group responded by following the audit's financial suggestions, but she also noted the auditor found that no money had been spent inappropriately.

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Cultural Resources said her agency, which administers grant money received by the museum, met with Sit-In officials after the audit and was satisfied with their response.

People who are not involved in the project simply don't understand its complexity, said local attorney Harris, who has helped Sit-In since its inception as legal adviser.

He acknowledges that a casual observer might compare its progress unfavorably to the Greensboro Children's Museum, which only took several years to make happen at what seemed like a reasonable cost.

But it's a different ballgame, Harris said, when you are restoring a time-worn building to the standards of historic preservation at the same time you make it suitable to house museum artifacts of national significance.

"I have to explain to people that they're looking at it in exactly the right way if we were putting up a new building," Harris said. "But in this case, the building is the exhibit. You just have to spend whatever you need to spend."

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com