Urban League Opens Civil Rights Museum In Harlem 

When we talk about the Civil Rights Movement, we often focus on the work done in the southern states to end segregation and state-sponsored discrimination. The National Urban League is expanding the narrative by opening the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem. 

AP reports that the museum is located in the Urban League’s Manhattan headquarters and opens this weekend. The museum showcases the lesser-known aspects of the Civil Rights movement, including Harlem residents who made culturally and politically significant contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. 

“We want people to know that they are key participants,” Jennifer Scott, the museum’s founding executive director and chief curator, told The Associated Press while previewing the space. “History is living, it’s unfinished, and we can impact it.”

“Designating this the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem anchors it to a place, and this place tells the story,” Marc Morial, the Urban League’s president and CEO, told the AP before the museum’s opening. “From this place, we’re telling the story of this place.”

Many of the nation’s museums that focus on the Civil Rights Movement are located throughout the South, in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. It’s understandable, as the racism in the South was incredibly pronounced given the Confederacy, Jim Crow, and the casual brutality Black people were, quite honestly, still are subjected to throughout the region. Morial lamented to AP that there aren’t more museums telling the stories of institutionalized racism Black people had to face throughout the northern states. 

From AP:

The museum’s multimedia installations cover centuries of social justice history and culture. The inaugural exhibits recount the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the first and second waves of the Great Migration of Black families from the Deep South, and the story of the Civil Rights Movement and its modern impacts.

In several exhibits, audio recordings relay speeches of civil rights leaders and oral histories of people interviewed about their experiences. Feedback walls invite guests to share if they’ve participated in a protest or read a banned book.

Throughout the museum’s curation process, Scott prioritized immersion not only through mediums but through the stories that the Urban League chose to represent. “We wanted people to see themselves,” she said. “It’s a very diasporic representation and storytelling approach.”

As a self-described proponent of intersectional solidarity, Morial echoed the importance of celebrating a diverse range of perspectives from people who rallied alongside African Americans in the northern fight for civil rights.

“We don’t want this great concept, equal opportunity and diversity, to be suppressed,” he said.

The timing of the museum’s opening could not be better, as the Trump administration is actively suppressing Black history and narratives about the Civil Rights Movement in our national museums. We’ve seen stories celebrating Black military heroes removed from official military websites, as well as the removal of an exhibit telling the history of George Washington’s slaves outside the President’s House. 

The location of the museum is even more notable, considering that the Trump administration canceled a grant for the New York Underground Railroad Museum. Morial noted the political climate the museum is opening in, telling AP that the museum retells history “with all of its beauty, and with all of its warts.”

“This history is not going to be minimized or suppressed in any way,” he said.

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