New museum alert: Harlem’s Urban Civil Rights Museum opens this weekend
The museum opens amid the Trump's efforts to erase the history of Civil Rights
Harlem’s getting a new museum about the northern fight for Civil Rights, in the New York neighborhood that helped shape Black history across the country.
The first of its kind outside the South, The Urban Civil Rights Museum opens this weekend and was established by the National Urban League, one of the longest running Civil Rights organizations in the country. The League got its start in Harlem in 1910 and moved its headquarters back to the neighborhood last year. The new museum opens on the fourth floor of the League’s headquarters on 125th Street.
Divya S., a doctor in her mid-30s who attended the museum preview, recalled the building’s Harlem Renaissance gallery, with its bright reds and greens, and hearing music by artists of the era. With the Great Migration and Jim Crow sections around it, she said, the room showed “how joy and injustice can exist at the same time, and how joy itself is a form of resistance.” That carried through to the rest of the museum for her.
“It tells the truth about injustice without sanitizing it or exploiting pain, celebrates Black culture’s influence on the world, and most of all, centers Black joy,” she told The Groove.
The museum intentionally centers Harlem at its core.
