Civil Rights Museum

I will admit that during our visit to the National Civil Rights Museum, I kind of hurried through the first half. The information promised that the new part of the museum, located across the street, dealt with more contemporary issues than did the half located in the Lorraine motel. This wasn’t out of any disrespect to the race rights movement, but it is a subject I feel more than well-versed in: it’s been covered exhaustively in innumerable classes throughout my public-school career. I was simply more interested in modern day rights battles.

Call this self-interested, because it was. I wasn’t sure what the second half of the museum would have, but I envisioned, somewhat hopefully it would prove, a section devoted to the gay rights movement. The first half of the museum culminated with Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. The first important event in the gay rights movement, the Stonewall Riots, occurred in 1969. I too readily assumed that it would be represented. What I saw, instead, was rather exclusionary: there was a note about Harvey Milk on the wall of assassinations, and a note on the Vermont Civil Union legislation of 2001 in an area dedicated to modern-day advances in civil rights. At the end of the exhibit was a call to action, urging us all to end discrimination based on, among other things, sexual orientation. There was no mention of the gains in marriage equality in Massachusetts, or of the repressive federal policies inherent in the Defense of Marriage Act and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. No mention of the recent revocation of rights under California’s proposition 8 ballot initiative. Nothing about the AIDS crisis being largely ignored until it hit the heterosexual scene. And at the end of the exhibit, I found no guest book no comment card, no way to object to these omissions.

I complained briefly about these omissions to my friends, expecting, hoping for some note of sympathy. I was quickly encouraged to shut up. “Thats not the focus of the museum,” I was told. Perhaps it wasn’t. It has every right to be, though. It is, after all, the National Civil Rights Museum. Not the National Race Rights Museum. Furthermore, where were the other civil rights fights? Women were barely represented, there was nothing about the status of illegal immigrants or their children, nothing about the unethical treatment of “enemy combatants” at the hands of the U.S. Perhaps these things simply don’t fall under the umbrella of ‘civil rights;’ they’re ‘gay rights’ and ‘women’s rights’ and ‘immigrants’ rights.’ At the end of the second exhibit, however, was a film waxing poetic about the United Nation’s universal declaration of human rights. Why is a museum so dedicated to promoting human rights so exclusive? The battle for civil rights is no complete nor is it exclusive, so why has it been portrayed as such? Furthermore, it is damaging to ignore other struggles for rights; it treats them as somehow less important, and prioritizes one group’s struggle for recognition. Does this not violate the fundamental axiom of these battles? That, as is so often quoted, “all men are created equal” and hold “certain unalienable Rights”?

The National Civil Rights Museum, as is, merely ignores every fight for rights excluding the race rights movement. The museum should either cease to ignore these unrepresented minorities, or be dedicatedly more inclusive by rebranding itself as the National Race Rights Museum. As is, it is an embarrassment and an insult to every minority that is not represented, and only serves to enforce the idea that somehow these pursuits for rights, these oppressed groups, are less important and deserving.