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Greensboro's Former Polio Hospital Is Getting A Historical Marker

These women, some of those arrested in Greensboro during anti-segregation demonstrations, are being held May 21, 1963. The makeshift jail was previously the city's polio hospital and could accommodate 1,100 people. (AP Photo/Spencer Jones)

A former hospital in Greensboro is getting a historical marker this week.

The Central Carolina Convalescent Center began at the height of the polio epidemic. 1948 was a particularly bad year, with more than 2,000 cases across North Carolina.

Greensboro was among the hardest hit areas.

Citizens banded together and started raising money to help. The center was built near the intersection of Huffine Mill Road and East Bessemer Avenue just 95 days after the fundraising began.

It was racially integrated from the outset, treating and employing both whites and African Americans.

Fifteen years later, police jailed more than 1,000 people marching to desegregate movie theaters and restaurants, and the former hospital served as a jail for the protesters.

A dedication program for the N.C. Highway Historical Marker will be held Saturday in Greensboro with the marker placed later at a nearby intersection.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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