In 1990, I was present at the 30th anniversary re-enactment of the historic sit-ins that became a key part of the civil rights movement. It was a special moment because it was the last time the men known as the Greensboro Four — David Richmond, Ezell Blair (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil — appeared in public together. Richmond would die just a few weeks later.

It was also special because the downtown Woolworth’s where they staged the sit-ins was still a dimestore. To see the four men — older and grayer — walk into the store pretty much as it had been 30 years earlier and sit down at the same lunch counter truly was a touching sight.

I recently returned to the site of the sit-ins for the first time since witnessing the re-enactment, except it’s not a Woolworth’s any more. The store closed soon after and remained closed until last month, when the International Civil Rights Museum opened just in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins.

I was eager to tour the museum, mostly because it has been surrounded by controversy during the 17 years it took to complete. The museum’s founders — Guilford County Commissioner Skip Alston and state Rep. Earl Jones, a former Greensboro City Council member — have been polarizing figures on the local political scene for years. After both the city and the county provided financial support for the museum, questions about the handling of those finances constantly were being raised, with Greensboro citizens ultimately expressing their dissatisfaction with Alston and Jones by twice voting down bond referenda providing additional funding.

In fact, Alston was the center of controversy right before the museum’s opening when it was revealed that he brokered a property deal for an ownership group hoping to build a federally subsidized 200-room luxury hotel across the street from the museum. When members of the Greensboro City Council questioned the hotel project, Alston reportedly threatened a recall movement before apologizing.

But I entered the museum with an open mind, sincerely hoping it would live up to expectations. Museum staff was very courteous, and guided tours took place every hour, although unguided tours will be available later on. The artifacts are minimal, and most of the tour relies on photographs and film footage. The lunch counter is still there, although the tour guide was careful to point out that the stools and the section of counter where the four men took their historic seats are now in their rightful place in the Smithsonian Institution.

The tour is roughly in the form of a timeline, walking visitors through various phases of the civil rights movement. At the start, visitors descend down an escalator into a dark gallery portraying graphic images of violence against African-Americans, the most disturbing of which is the open casket of Emmitt Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy who was lynched brutally and murdered in Mississippi in the mid-1950s allegedly for whistling at a white woman.

These events no doubt prompted the Greensboro Four to plot their historic action, and with that in mind, visitors enter an auditorium where they are shown a 20-minute re-enactment of the students planning the sit-ins. After the movie, the guide lifted the screen to reveal a replica of the students’ dorm room at North Carolina A&T State University.

Visitors then climb the stairs to the lunch counter, where they watch another video re-enactment depicting the scene inside Woolworth’s. From there, visitors wind through a gallery filled with photos and artifacts putting the civil rights museum in perspective. Replicas of “colored only” water fountains and the colored entrance to the Greensboro train depot show how blacks were treated as second-class citizens.

Again, the artifacts are minimal. On display are the briefcase of J. Kenneth Lee, an African-American banker who handed out some of the first mortgage loans to bankers, the medical bag of Dr. George Evans, a Greensboro doctor who treated patients at L. Richardson Hospital, the city’s African-American hospital, and a 1950s-era organ to represent black churches’ role in the civil rights movement.

Stronger exhibits feature photographs and newsreel footage from historic civil rights moments, including the Montgomery bus boycott, the march across the Pettis Bridge from Selma to Montgomery, the March on Washington (where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech), and the Freedom Summer, when hundreds of white students went to Mississippi to help register black voters.

An entire wall is covered with the mug shots of those arrested while fighting for civil rights in the South, and it’s most interesting to read the brief profiles of the courageous people who put their own freedom on the line in helping ensure the freedom of others.

The tour takes about an hour, a good 20 minutes of which is watching video re-enactments. The museum is affiliated with the Smithsonian, which (one hopes) will mean some quality revolving exhibits through the years. Surely the museum will also be the focal point for many history and civil-rights-related events. It certainly will also play a huge role in the continued revitalization of downtown Greensboro.

Admittedly, I was one of the many skeptics who questioned whether the museum would ever actually open. Now that it has, I’m glad, though it has some work to do to become everything it was meant to be.