One thing that really stuck out to me in the podcast with Calinda Lee is when she said “The work is about remembering, the work is about figuring out how the past is relevant to what is happening right now. ” This really made think about things such as police brutality, and the black live matter movement and how I saw very similar things to it when I visited the Civil and Human Rights Museum. That is why I chose this picture to accompany this post.

Another reason why I chose this place is because museums serve to educate and remember what has been done and created in the past. When I went to this museum, it did just that. This museum takes you on a tour through Jim Crow’s America and shows what African Americans were up against to gain their rights. It introduces you many heroes that played a huge role in why us African Americans now have the freedoms that we do. It’s a past too important to forget, and by having places such as the Civil and Human Rights Museum its hard for that part of history to ever truly be forgotten.

What also made the museum have such a powerful impact on me was how authentic it felt. There was one exhibit in particular that felt so real and really allowed me to get an understanding of what sit ins were like during the civil rights movement. They have you sit down at a diner countertop model and put headphones on that plays tracks of what African Americans would hear when they did these peaceful protests.  The exhibits on Martin Luther King Jr. were equally as impactful especially just listening to his sermons. I agree with Hobson in his article when he says “Today, King’s legacy has fallen prey to exploitation and capitalism and suffered a whitewashing- a revised history that simplifies his legacy into a sanitized narrative void of complexities.” It is important for museums to be authentic, it is incredible disrespectful in my opinion to downplay the history of this great individuals who did so much for giving people basic human rights. Having these things be forgotten would be devastating especially since a lot of our lives, regardless of our ethnicity, has been impacted by this time period and the reason we have the world we have today. 

Hobson, Maurice J. “The King of Atlanta: Martin Luther King Jr. and Public Memory.” AAIHS, April 3, 2018. https://www.aaihs.org/the-king-of-atlanta-martin-luther-king-jr-and-public-memory/.