PERMANENT EXHIBITS
The museum offers 100 artifacts, more than 12 new films, 500 oral histories, interactive media and external listening posts that guide visitors through centuries of history — from the beginning of Black women's resistance during slavery, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, their Great Migration and the seminal events of the current century that inspired people around the world to stand up for equity. Video and sound stations provide selections from historical and contemporary interviews, literature, proverbs, prayers, folk tales, songs, and oral epics from the African continent as well as the African Diaspora. MoWRe has a special focus on promoting Transnational as well as Black Feminist histories and traditions, and is especially interested in promoting women's demonstrated capacity to reach across chasms of race, class, sexual orientation, geography, and religion to mount resistance and build movements for social justice.
"I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on
my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life" - June Jordan
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Gender Trap: Black Women, Rape and Resistance is a groundbreaking multimedia exhibit curated by Black feminists invoking memory of Black women's bodies who were as proclaimed by Fannie Lou Hamer—“never theirs alone”. Groundbreaking and fully interactive, the exhibit centers on response and revolutionary acts by Black women in America. It juxtaposes intentional confrontation by Black women who deal in policy, organizing, and public speech versus those who use more provocative measures to regain and reclaim themselves through other means like their bodies, armed struggle, music, gender-non conformity, sexuality and other weapons meant to meet violence with violence. Gender Trap explores the acts of resistance and risk taking of Black women in response to sexual violence.
Throughout the exhibit, narratives of fierce resistance and unapologetic reclamation on behalf of Black women breaks chains through this boundary crossing work that will leave each guest excited for direct action and changemaking.
The Exhibit will run through April; with talks every first Monday of the month.
STRANGER FRUIT: A HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN AMERICA and A black women's lynching memorial
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154 Recorded Cases of Black Female Lynching Victims 1886-1957
At least 154 Black women are known to have been lynched in America and hundreds more remain unknown. On July 26, 2013 we honor their memory.
We honor the memory of husbands, sons and daughters who often were lynched alongside these women and the community around them who experienced their loss. We acknowledge the modern-day lynchings of the new "Jim Crow" and the devastating impact this has on us and our families even as we deal today with the continued devaluation of Black life.
The Exhibit presents a historical timeline denouncing institutional rape (s) and sexual harassment as torture against Black women, across generations by police officers and their forerunners - the white slavers, white militia, white-hooded-cross-burning night watchmen, "leather heads" and more recently officer Holtsclaw who was reported to have sexually assaulted approximately 19 Black women, and counting. This powerful exhibit will present and analyze the narratives of women and girls today, and particularly women of color who have been beaten, sexually assaulted, raped, brutally strip-searched, shot, and killed by law enforcement agents in the U.S.
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The exhibit will bring forth the lives of those for whom their gendered-and-race-specific forms of police misconduct and abuse cases garnered virtually no national attention--unique voices of women and transgender human beings who were the casualties of the “war of drugs”, the “war on terror”, “zero tolerance” and “quality of life”. The exhibit is a wake-up call for the need to center women and gender non-conforming lives squarely within the broader context of racial justice and the need to account for women’s stories in any advocacy effort to address police violence in communities.
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Free for members of Black Women's Blueprint.