The National Urban League’s Urban Civil Rights Museum opens to the public on November 14 in Harlem, with a grand opening weekend on November 14 and 15 featuring music, dance, and hands-on activities.
The museum occupies about 12,000 square feet on the fourth floor of the Urban League Empowerment Center at 117 West 125th Street, near the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The center is a $300 million development that also includes 170 affordable housing units and space for minority-owned businesses, according to Axios.
The permanent exhibition, Moving History Forward, traces the struggle for civil rights from the 1500s to the present through what NYC Tourism calls a less frequently explored Northern lens. It covers the transatlantic slave trade, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and campaigns waged outside the South.
Visitors can listen to recorded speeches and oral histories and use interactive installations, including feedback walls that ask about experiences like joining a protest or reading a banned book.
The first special exhibition, Thriving! Harlem as Homeplace, focuses on neighborhood life and memory and runs through May 17, 2027. It features metalpoint portraits by Harlem-born artist D. Lammie-Hanson.
“History is living, it’s unfinished, and we can impact it,” founding executive director and chief curator Jennifer Scott told the Associated Press.
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, has said Harlem was a deliberate choice. “The civil rights story didn’t just unfold in the South — the North was a battlefield, too,” he told Axios in December 2025. “Harlem shaped the movement, and this museum makes sure no one can pretend otherwise.”
The Urban League itself was founded in 1910 to help Black Americans moving north during the Great Migration.
Plan Your Visit
The museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m., according to its website. Tickets and memberships are sold through the museum’s online ticketing site. Admission prices were not listed at press time.
For now, the museum is set to open this Saturday. For anyone who learned civil rights history as a Southern story, it makes a strong case for looking north.
Photo Credit: Urban Civil Rights Museum
