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Street renamed in honor of former Guilford Commissioner Carolyn Coleman

Carolyn Q. Coleman. Photograph courtesy of Guilford County

A Greensboro intersection now bears the name of two civil rights pioneers following the city's move to rename part of a street to honor former County Commissioner Carolyn Q. Coleman.

A portion of Bragg Street that intersects with Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Greensboro is now dubbed Carolyn Coleman Way.

Coleman died in January, leaving a legacy that included serving as Guilford County's first Black chairwoman.

City Councilwoman Sharon Hightower, Coleman's longtime friend, says it's fitting that the street now named for her directly connects to the street named for Dr. King.

“Her life was civil rights,” Hightower says. “And she lived that until the end.”

A ceremony for the renaming was held Saturday at Coleman's church, New Zion Missionary Baptist Church, on what would have been her 80th birthday.

Coleman was a native of Savannah and was arrested during the sit-ins there in the 1960s. She later received a Master of Science degree from North Carolina A&T State University.

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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