Our Story
HARLEM HOMECOMING
The Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem (UCRM) was established by The National Urban League, one of the country’s longest running Civil Rights organizations. When the Museum opens its doors in Fall 2026, it will be New York’s first museum dedicated to Civil Rights and one of the first in the nation focused on the history of Civil Rights in the North.
Headquartered in New York City, the National Urban League was founded in 1910 in Harlem in response to the Great Migration that brought millions of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. In 2025, the National Urban League relocated its New York City headquarters to a new 17-story building in Harlem at West 125th Street - a mixed-use development that includes office, residential, and retail spaces. This move signifies a heartfelt return home to Harlem where the organization began over more than a century. The Museum is located on the fourth floor of the National Urban League’s new headquarters in the heart of iconic Harlem on 125th Street.
A FULLER STORY
While many museums and monuments chronicle and memorialize the long and well-documented history of racial inequality and the struggle for Civil Rights in the Jim Crow South, the Urban Civil Rights Museum in Harlem expands the traditional timeline and geographical focus of Civil Rights histories. We begin in the 1500s, over 300 years before the modern Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, and we focus on stories in the urban North. The Museum also elevates important historic moments that are not often associated with Civil Rights history, including the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the two waves of the Great Migration, and the Harlem Renaissance.
DISPLACEMENT AND RESISTANCE
The Museum maps early movement North through the brutal displacement of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Middle Passage which kidnapped 12 million people from African countries and forced them into dehumanizing labor in the Americas. Visitors will be introduced to the early massive injustices that everyday people met with creative resistance as they fought for freedom for themselves and their families through the turn of the century. The Museum features stories about slavery in the North, the Underground Railroad, fugitives, anti-slavery organizations, uprisings, and the development of maroon societies and Free Black communities in the Northeast, Midwest, West, and Canada that were established before the Civil War and during post-emancipation in Northern states.
MOVING NORTH
The Great Migration was a period of sustained movement of African Americans from the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast, and West between 1900 and 1970, as they searched for economic, political, and social opportunities and fled violence in the South. The Museum explores narratives that are part of the Black freedom struggle that expanded dramatically in the aftermath of the Great Migration of Blacks northward in urban environments across America.
RENAISSANCE
The Great Migration dramatically shaped the arts, culture and politics of Northern urban cities, often creating what has been called a ‘renaissance’ in Black neighborhoods such as in Chicago and Los Angeles. In New York, Harlem became a powerful creative Black epicenter known as the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro Movement of the 1920’s championed racial pride, self-expression, and artistic exploration, finding its voice in literature, art, music, and theater. Through the work of writers, thinkers and artists, like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others, in the Museum, visitors will experience the Harlem Renaissance as not just an artistic movement, but also as foundational social and political movement.
MOVING HISTORY FORWARD
The Museum is a chance for visitors to learn about Civil Rights history and to make connections to the present. It is a call to action. Within the Museum, we invite visitors to explore Civil Rights issues in the 21st century, consider their role in the social justice eco-system and participate in re-imagining the future together. How can we create a more just world and a world we want to see? How can we move Civil Rights forward? History is waiting for your answer.