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The retired longtime president of Greensboro’s United Way and the attorney whose name is attached to numerous firsts for a black man in North Carolina will lead the inaugural “1960 Society” in support of the downtown civil rights museum.

Neil Belenky and Henry Frye were in awe as they recently stepped inside the former Woolworth’s dime store building, which is still in the throes of renovation. The museum commemorates the day four N.C. A&T freshmen sat down at the segregated lunch counter almost 50 years ago, igniting a protest movement that spread across the South.

The museum is scheduled to open debt-free on Feb. 1, 2010, the 50th anniversary of the start of the sit-ins.

“It’s like when someone puts your name outside the door of your new office,” Belenky said after workers pulled back the covering to reveal the International Civil Rights Center & Museum logo.

“It makes it real,” said Belenky, known for his work in the background of community projects.

Frye was the state’s first black Supreme Court justice and later chief justice. He stood on the building’s original, refurbished, gray-themed tile flooring and recalled interrupting Skip Moore of the Weaver Foundation, a major project supporter, when Moore sought his help to lead the campaign.

“I said, 'You don’t need to go through that long spiel with me — what do you want me to do?’” Frye, a longtime museum supporter, said with a laugh.

The push that began after Woolworth’s announced its closing in 1993 and now includes the 1960 Society effort is in its final sprint.

Last week, an anthropologist with experience in telling the story of African American culture was announced as the museum’s $80,000-a-year curator and program director. Also, organizers are working to get President Barack Obama at the opening, which will include a town hall meeting and an ecumenical service at the Greensboro Coliseum.

Belenky and Frye are expected to cultivate an inaugural giving group at levels ranging from $50 to more than $10,000. The larger donations between now and the building’s opening will be acknowledged in a permanent section of the building.

Those who give anything during that time will be listed permanently on the museum’s Web site.

“In 1960, it was people of good faith, black and white, who together sat at that lunch counter with commitment, vision and determination, and that’s what they bring to this effort,” Amelia Parker, the museum’s executive director, said of Belenky and Frye.

“This was a clear question of who stands in this community as advocates for freedom and justice and equality, and who will stand for integrity, and who by their very presence lend the force of their credibility to this continuous movement,” Parker said.

The 1960 Society has received a vote of confidence with a $100,000 gift from the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro.

The museum, given an interior gray slate wall treatment, is expected to be self-supporting, based on memberships, admission and exhibit sponsorships.

The 1960 Society will help support an expected $1 million annual operating budget through memberships.

Frye’s own iconic history is part of the museum. Prohibited from voting by a Jim Crow literacy law, he made repeal of it his first order of business as the first black member of the General Assembly since Reconstruction.

Frye recalled walking by the museum a few years ago and striking up a conversation with visitors from California taking in the building’s facade.

“They said, 'When it opens, I want to come back,’” said Frye, who practices law in Greensboro and teaches at A&T, his alma mater. “It’s telling me this is going to draw people from everywhere.”

Belenky, perhaps best known for the years he led the United Way of Greater Greensboro and for initiating programs to solve some of the city’s most pressing social problems, also had a first-hand brush with the fight for civil rights.

The Pennsylvania native, a white college student in the 1960s, ventured south to Birmingham to prepare black high school kids for college and to register black voters — the same summer three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi.

While there, Belenky lived in the dorm at Miles College — a campus secured by guards toting rifles.

“This is our generation’s gift to the next generation,” Belenky said of the museum, which will span two floors and cover 30,000 square feet.

The museum should be a point of pride for everyone in the greater Greensboro area, he said.

“There are probably very few cities in the country who have had such influence on the direction of social justice, from the Underground Railroad to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and the (Woolworth’s) sit-ins,” Belenky said. “This is an extremely important city to our nation — and an extremely important story.”

The Greensboro museum is planned as a blend of period artifacts, high-tech media and scholarly research into the history of civil rights in America.

Exhibits include “Jail or Bail!” with the police mug shots of protesters arrested throughout the South and in sit-ins.

“Politics and the Voting Booth” includes interactive voter experiences and ballot boxes from the era .

As an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum could also display exhibits assembled from national archives.

The museum’s operations will be overseen by Parker and a management committee culled from the board of directors and major donors, including the Weaver and Bryan foundations.

Guilford County commissioners Chairman Melvin “Skip” Alston, who helped keep the building from becoming a planned parking lot, says the museum won’t forget the “great diversity” of the history of the civil rights movement.

“Black and white, Jews and Gentiles, every ethnic group has touched this project,” said Alston, chairman of the board of directors. “Fifty years later and a place used to segregate is bringing people together. This is everybody’s museum.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com