Slavery Museums in the News

The US National Slavery Museum may still be raising funds to complete its building and open to the public, but in the meantime a museum focusing on the history of slavery in the US has opened on a much smaller scale in a former slave market in Charleston, SC. The opening of this museum follows closely on the heels of the late August opening of the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool, UK. Meanwhile, "A Slave Ship Speaks," the traveling exhibition of the Henrietta Marie continues to make the rounds, as it has for over a decade. The museum world certainly has come a long way from the 1994 when "the re-enactment of an 18th-century slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg, developed in response to criticism that interpretive programs there sanitised slavery, brought angry protests from the Virginia NAACP charging that the auction was a sideshow used as entertainment." (source) Today, Colonial Williamsburg does address slavery, though only through its dramatizations.