A new museum that is dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement will be opening in Harlem, New York, this summer, thanks to the National Urban League. The Urban Civil Rights Museum will be New York City’s first institution dedicated to the movement, with a focus on how it played out in Northern U.S. cities.
The museum is slated to open in June in coordination with the organization’s anniversary, and will be housed in the Empowerment Center, which is the National Urban League’s recently opened headquarters in Harlem. In a recent commemoration of the center, National Urban League CEO Marc Morial stated that the new building “is a declaration that we will not be erased, that our history matters, and that our communities deserve investment—not neglect.”
“It would be misleading to present the history of the northern cities outside the context of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the institutionalized enslavement of African people and their descendants,” said Urban Civil Rights Museum Executive Director Jennifer Scott in a press statement. “What did it really mean to be a free Black New Yorker, pre-Civil War, when states as nearby as New Jersey were still enslaving people, and how complicated was the idea of freedom at that time?”…