New York City has never had a museum devoted to the civil rights movement. On Saturday, Harlem gets one, and it is built around the part of the story most American classrooms skip: what Black people fought in the North.
The Urban Civil Rights Museum opens to the public Nov. 14 and 15 on the fourth floor of the National Urban League’s new headquarters at 117 West 125th Street. It is billed as New York’s first museum dedicated to civil rights and one of the first in the country to focus on the Northern struggle. The opening weekend includes music, dance and hands-on activities.
The gap in the record matters. When the movement is taught as a Southern drama of buses and lunch counters, the redlined blocks, segregated schools and closed job ladders of Northern cities look like someone else’s history. For the millions of Black families whose grandparents left the South in the Great Migration, they were the next chapter.
The exhibits start earlier than most civil rights museums do. They cover the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Northern states, the Underground Railroad, free Black settlements, maroon societies and abolition, then the two waves of the Great Migration and the modern fights that followed. Visitors will find interactive booths, projected imagery, artifacts, television segments, large maps, and audio of leaders’ speeches and oral histories. One piece is a replica of the wooden box Henry “Box” Brown used to escape slavery, shipping himself for 27 hours to an abolitionist in Philadelphia.
Jennifer Scott, the founding executive director and chief curator, said the museum wants to fill in what people assume. “Visitors learn about the transatlantic slave trade, which is not normally associated with the civil rights movement, and the reality of slavery in the northern states, which is a part of the story that’s often overlooked,” she said. She added: “We want people to know that they are key participants. History is living, it’s unfinished, and we can impact it.”
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, conceived the museum with Scott. He said the choice of Harlem was deliberate. “Designating this the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem anchors it to a place, and this place tells the story. From this place, we’re telling the story of this place.”
He also gave the opening its edge. “This history is not going to be minimized or suppressed in any way,” Morial said.
That is the argument for a museum like this one. It sits in a 17-story tower that also holds retail space and affordable housing, owned by a Black civil rights organization, on 125th Street near the Schomburg Center. When the telling of Black history depends on public goodwill, a space the Urban League controls is a space nobody else can edit. New York should have had it decades ago.
The museum opens its doors Saturday, Nov. 14.
Have your say