National Urban League’s new civil rights museum tells the Black Northern civil rights story

lack history in the North began long before Southern families boarded trains for the Great Migration. Generations of Black people had been enslaved in the North, fought for their freedom here, and built communities. In its retelling of the African American Civil Rights struggle, the National Urban League’s new Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem (UCRM) will center the lives of Black northerners during its grand opening and ribbon-cutting on Nov. 14, Located on the fourth floor of the NUL’s Empowerment Center at 117 West 125th Street, organizers say the UCRM is New York City’s first museum dedicated to showing how Northern communities resisted injustices. The North needs its own civil rights story “There needs to be something else because the southern Black experience is not the totality of the Black experience,” Marc H. Morial, NUL’s president and CEO, told the Amsterdam News. “What existed in the North? Slavery! It was in every single state, except maybe Vermont,” Morial explained.

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