Lorillard supports Civil Rights Center

February 27, 2009

GREENSBORO, N.C. - Lorillard Tobacco Company has donated $1 million to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum under construction in downtown Greensboro.

The center and museum will be located on the site of the F.W. Woolworth building where the famous lunch-counter sit-ins took place in 1960 to protest segregated eating facilities.

Exhibits at the museum will honor the role Greensboro residents played in the U.S. civil-rights movement.

"As a company that has based its operations in Greensboro for more than 50 years, Lorillard has witnessed this community embrace, support and nurture the rights of individuals," Martin L. Orlowsky, president and CEO of Lorillard, says in a statement.

The Civil Rights Center is scheduled to open in February 2010, in time to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins, Amelia Parker, the museum's executive director, says in a statement.

Lorillard Tobacco Company, founded in 1760, is the oldest tobacco company in the United States.

The International Civil Rights Center and Museum is a project of Sit-In Movement Inc., a group founded in 1993 to commemorate the Woolworth sit-ins and the Civil Rights movement.

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