Museums that Celebrate Civil Rights

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, the Tenement Museum would like to recognize a few of the museums and institutions that carry on Dr. King’s legacy. The issues we tackle here at the Tenement Museum -- immigration and immigrant rights -- are a core component of the contemporary civil rights movement. Immigrant reformers are looking to Dr. King for inspiration as immigration reform and legislation are debated. I highly recommend a visit to any of the following institutions to think about civil rights in America.

The National Civil Rights Museum
Memphis, Tennessee

Chronicles the struggle for civil rights from 1619 through the present. The Museum is housed in the former Lorraine Motel, the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. Dr. King’s hotel room is on display and visitors stand just feet from the balcony where he was shot.

Civil Rights Memorial Center
Montgomery, Alabama

The Memorial Center, located at the Southern Poverty Law Center, honors those who lost their lives during the Civil Rights Movement. It includes a section on contemporary civil rights issues as well as a “Wall of Tolerance.” Visitors who add their names to the wall are promising to take a stand against injustice.

The National Voting Rights Museum and Institute
Selma, Alabama

This community museum is steps from the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Museum features the powerful “I Was There” wall that invites Selma-to-Montgomery marchers and witnesses to share their stories. Many of the staff were involved in the Civil Rights Movement and offer their powerful first-hand accounts.

If you’re in the NYC area, plan to visit the Bronx Museum of the Arts between March 28 – July 11, 2010 to view “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956 – 1968.” This striking photography exhibit contains 150 vintage photographs and documents the key figures and events of the Movement. I was lucky enough to see it at the High Museum of Art when it opened in 2008, and it’s not to be missed.

- posted by Pamela Mattera

Merry Christmas from the Tenement Museum

Merry Christmas to all our readers!

 Read a history of the Volunteers of America sidewalk Santas. They've been around for over 100 years with their distinctive chimneys. Apparently the New York chapter even created a "Santa School" in the 1950s.

And here's a bit about how cartoonist Thomas Nast invented the Santa that's familiar to so many Americans - today a personification of Christmas, but not always so.

We're also carrying this book, The Battle for Christmas, at the Museum Shop for the holidays. Author Stephen Nissenbaum "rediscovers Christmas's carnival origins and shows how it was transformed, during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism." Apparently New Yorkers played a prominent role (mais oui).

Warm wishes to all!

The Tenement Museum blog will return on December 29.

Happy Thanksgiving!

In the midst of the American Civil War, on October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln decreed that the last Thursday of November would henceforth be "a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."

The holiday had been celebrated unofficially since the 17th century and was made an official national holiday by President George Washington on October 3, 1789.

Interestingly, both men used this day of Thanksgiving to unite the nation.

In 1789, Washington decreed "Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being... That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks -- for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation... for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted." (By October 1789, 11 states had ratified the Constitution, including New York.)

Seventy-four years later, Lincoln asked the nation to give thanks for its blessings even in the midst of crushing war: new freedom (Emancipation), peace and order (after bloody draft riots in New York and elsewhere), and the abundance of the frontier (work began on the Trans-Continental Railroad that year).

He wrote, "It has seemed to me fit and proper that [the gracious gifts of the Most High God] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."

For newcomers to America, who came in large numbers from the German states and Ireland during the mid-19th century, Thanksgiving provided a chance to give thanks for a new home, a new job, safety, freedom. Perhaps the new residents of 97 Orchard Street, constructed that year, were thankful for new housing. The holiday also provided an opportunity for all Americans (native or foreign born, Northern or Southern) to come together around a singular national holiday.

This Thomas Nast illustration from the November 20, 1869 issue of Harper's Weekly shows a number of different people sharing a turkey at the table of "self-government" and "universal suffrage." Nast was never particularly sympathetic towards immigrants, so this cartoon is most likely poking fun.

Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Questions for Curatorial - History of Homelessness

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Was there a real problem with homelessness in the 1900s?

Homelessness has been a presence in New York since shortly after Peter Minuit completed his celebrated “purchase” of Manhattan Island from the Native Americans in 1626. During the ensuing three and a half centuries, a variety of approaches have been taken by churches, municipal government, and countless private charities in an effort to address a problem of ever changing nature and dimensions.

Historians have long debated the nature of poverty in American history, but most agree that no clear line separated ordinary working people from those in need of help because of periodic destitution. The result of great social and economic transformations in American life, poor and homeless families were most often those caught in the throes of a society experiencing unprecedented changes in the nature of work. As a result, homelessness was often temporary or intermittent. Nevertheless, between 1865 and the 1930s, as American made the difficult transition from a primarily agrarian society to an urban and industrial one, a much enlarged homeless populated emerged

The urban origins of a vagrant, homeless population are significant. The new homelessness of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was an indigenous aspect of a country in rapid transition from an agricultural and small town society to one centered in great cities. At the time, a study found that two-thirds of New York’s homeless men were born in cities, and most of the remainder had grown up in towns, not farming communities.

For many workers, employment was sporadic regardless of the general health of the economy. In 1900, about one-fifth of all workers in the United States were out of work from one to twelve months. In an era that predates unemployment insurance and/or workers compensation, periodic employment often equaled periodic homelessness. Even if workers had been completely willing to adapt themselves to changing industrial conditions (and often they were not), a certain number would have become vagrants because of the surplus labor created by these conditions. Seasonal labor, the introduction of new machinery, and the replacement of adult workers by child labor all created unemployment. The resulting demoralization undoubtedly led many men and their families into homelessness.

Fluctuations in the business cycle of the new industrial economy, which periodically resulted in sharp increases in unemployment, invariably led to an upsurge in the number of homeless. This was undoubtedly the case in the 1870s, 1890s, and the 1930s, when economic crises befell the American people.

No longer confined to the city’s “skid rows,” the contemporary homeless population has not only grown, but has taken on new dimensions. It contains a much greater number of mentally-ill individuals than ever before. Entire families lose their homes as their breadwinners face long-term unemployment and as the low-income housing in the marginal areas of the city that once provided them with a safety net is lost or destroyed by gentrification and development.

Today in History: Statue of Liberty Arrives in NY Harbor

The Statue of Liberty arrived at its permanent home at Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor on June 19, 1885, aboard the French frigate Isere. A gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States, the 151-foot-tall statue was created to commemorate the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence. Designed by sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi and officially titled Liberty Enlightening the World, the Statue of Liberty has symbolized freedom and democracy to the nation and to the world for over 120 years.

Continue reading Library of Congress' "Today in History": http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html

Permalink: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/jun19.html

-Posted by Kate Stober

Drayton Hall

A series on historic residential buildings around the world that have been turned into museums.



Miles away from England's workhouses, literally and on the socioeconomic spectrum, this old brick plantation house just outside Charleston, South Carolina preserves layers of early American history. 23 year old John Drayton, the son of British immigrants, built a Georgian-Palladian style mansion on 350 acres of farmland several decades before the American Revolution, and his grandson and great-grandson (both named Charles) lived through the cultural battles over slavery leading up to the Civil War. In the early 1800s, the family owned about 26 slaves. This virtual tour tells their stories, and those of the seven generations of Draytons who managed the property before it was sold to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1974.

-posted by Liana Grey