NEW YORK (The Thursday Times) — New York City’s first museum devoted to the civil rights struggle in the American North opened in Harlem on Saturday, as the National Urban League unveiled the Urban Civil Rights Museum at its new headquarters on 125th Street.
The museum fills nearly 12,000 square feet (about 1,100 square metres) on the fourth floor of the Urban League Empowerment Center, a few blocks from the Apollo Theater and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. It mixes a permanent installation with rotating galleries, recorded speeches, and oral histories.
Dozens of civil rights museums are spread across the United States, most of them in the South. The Urban League says none has focused on the North, where Black families who left the Deep South in the Great Migration met their own segregation in housing, schools, and jobs.
From the slave trade to the present
The permanent exhibition, Moving History Forward, traces the fight for justice from the 1500s to today. The opening displays cover the trans-Atlantic slave trade, both waves of the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy. Feedback walls ask visitors whether they have joined a protest or read a banned book, and the first temporary show runs until May 17, 2027.
“We want people to know that they are key participants,” said Jennifer Scott, the museum’s founding executive director and chief curator. “History is living, it’s unfinished, and we can impact it.”
Marc Morial, the Urban League’s president and chief executive, said the museum’s name was chosen to tie it to the neighbourhood. “Designating this the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem anchors it to a place, and this place tells the story,” he said.
‘With all of its warts’
The opening comes as some American museums face pressure over how they present race. Last year the Trump administration ordered a review of federally guided museums for what it called “divisive, race-centred ideology”.
Morial said the museum would tell the history “with all of its beauty, and with all of its warts”, and that it would not be “minimalised or suppressed in any way”. Scott said the galleries were only “scratching the surface” of local stories, from Harlem Renaissance nightlife to the Black press.
The Urban League, founded in 1910 and one of the oldest civil rights groups in the United States, plans to change the exhibitions over time. “This museum is not static,” Morial said. “We are just getting started.”
