New York is about to get a long-overdue addition to its cultural landscape: the Urban Civil Rights Museum, set to open in Harlem later this year. When it does, it will become the city’s first museum dedicated entirely to the American civil rights movement—and one that deliberately shifts the spotlight north.
For decades, civil rights history has largely been framed through a Southern lens. This museum argues that the story is incomplete. As National Urban League president and CEO Marc Morial pointed out to Gothamist, slavery existed in the North, too, and cities like New York played a critical role in shaping struggles around housing, labor, policing, education and political power.
The museum will occupy roughly 20,000 square feet inside the National Urban League’s new headquarters at 117 West 125th Street, directly across from the newly expanded Studio Museum in Harlem. That building—the 17-story Urban League Empowerment Center—is a major project in its own right: a $242 million, mixed-use development that includes office and retail space for nonprofits and minority-owned businesses, a 10,000-square-foot civic conference center and 170 units of affordable housing…