Nearly 12,000-square-foot venue will focus on northern civil rights history
The National Urban League will open the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem on Saturday, Nov. 14, inside the organization’s Manhattan headquarters. The museum will explore lesser-known histories of the Civil Rights Movement in the North, including local changemakers and artists whose contributions helped shape politics and culture worldwide. It is the first museum of its kind in New York City devoted to civil rights.
Located in the Urban League’s Manhattan headquarters, the museum will have nearly 12,000 square feet, or 1,100 square meters, of permanent and rotating exhibits and galleries. Museum organizers say they hope to remind visitors of their “collective power” in the present.
Jennifer Scott, the museum’s founding executive director and chief curator, is a national public history scholar with experience preserving Black history in museums and research centers across the country. She led the design of a permanent interactive installation and an inaugural set of rotating exhibitions. “We want people to know that they are key participants,” Scott said. “History is living, it’s unfinished, and we can impact it,” she said.
The multimedia installations cover centuries of social justice history and culture. 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. Audio recordings relay speeches by civil rights leaders and oral histories from people describing their experiences. Feedback walls invite visitors to say whether they have participated in a protest or read a banned book.
Marc Morial, the Urban League’s president and CEO, underscored the importance of establishing the museum just blocks from the Apollo Theater and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He attributed the same intentionality to the museum’s name and its specific mention of “this iconic American place called Harlem.”
“Designating this the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem anchors it to a place, and this place tells the story,” Morial said before the museum’s opening. “From this place, we’re telling the story of this place.”
Dozens of museums devoted to civil rights are scattered across the United States, most of them in Southern states. Other museums focus on arts and culture or examine specific moments in African American history. The Urban Civil Rights Museum’s organizers contend that it is the first of its kind in the northern United States.
Scott said she prioritized immersion through media and through the stories the Urban League chose to represent. “We wanted people to see ourselves,” she said. “It’s a very diasporic representation and storytelling approach.”
Morial, who described himself as a proponent of intersectional solidarity, said the museum should celebrate 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.
Morial said the current political climate compounded the importance of preserving the urban Civil Rights Movement. Some of the narratives displayed have been targeted in recent years in a push to sanitize how American history is told. Last year, the Trump administration ordered a review of U.S. museums under federal guidance for narratives it deemed “divisive, race-centered ideology,” urging them to “instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” Morial said the museum retells history “with all of its beauty, and with all of its warts.” “This history is not going to be minimalized or suppressed in any way,” he said.
Martha Biondi, a professor of history and Black studies at Northwestern University whose work has advanced awareness of New York’s civil rights struggles, said preserving that history was essential. “If America’s going to become a true multiracial democracy, we have to stop sanitizing our past and we have to tell the true stories,” Biondi said.
Morial and Scott lamented that the history of institutionalized racism in the North has often been overshadowed or even lost, while struggles in the Deep South are more widely recognized. For Scott, preserving forgotten accounts is both a personal passion and a priority.
Scott described drawing inspiration from the nightlife of the Harlem Renaissance and from legacy ethnic media including the New York Amsterdam News, Jet and Essence magazines. She said the museum is “just scratching the surface” in uncovering local stories. “It’s important to me and to all of us here who work at the museum, because we don’t want those stories to be erased ever again,” Scott said. “It started long before us, and we want it to continue after, so people are always feeling empowered to create the change that they desire.”
The Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem will celebrate its grand opening with invited elected officials and other guests on Saturday, Nov. 14. The Urban League plans to educate and involve the community in the museum’s programming. Morial said he was optimistic about both the museum and the movement it showcases. “This museum is not static, and we’re going to continue to evolve the exhibitions,” he said. “We are just getting started.”