Exhibits
MAAFA - Middle Passage Room
Maafa (or African Holocaust, Holocaust of Enslavement, or Black holocaust as alternatives) are terms used to describe the history and ongoing effects of atrocities inflicted on African people. The Maafa includes the Arab, French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Atlantic slave trades, and continued through imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression to the present day.
Hall of Resistance
In honor of those that resisted & continued to resist!! Fighting for freedom by crushing glass into slaveholder's families food, planning escapes, insurrections & rebellions, raiding & burning store houses & homes, stealing weapons, fighting to ward off punishment of loved ones, stealing food, creating the many underground railroad safehouses & routes along with abolitionists both black & white.... We honor those that resisted in the various Carribean Islands, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Southern slave-holding states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia,Alabama....Many died fighting for the right to be free!! We yearly recognize & induct those modern day heroes & sheroes that enable us to continue on the journey to consciousness & self-determination of who we are & who we are meant to be!! We thank the Many Professors, Poets, Authors, Educators, Religious Leaders, Singers, Musicians & Freedom Fighters who fought & created revolutions, movements, programs, songs, schools, books, ect for us to grow & participate in the community of our lives for the betterment of US ALL!!
Egyptian-7 Dynasties Room
While Europe was experiencing its Dark Ages, a period of intellectual, cultural, and economic regression from the sixth to the 13th centuries, Africans were experiencing an almost continent-wide renaissance after the decline of the Nile Valley civilizations of Egypt and Nubia.
The leading civilizations of this African rebirth were the Axum Empire, the Kingdom of Ghana, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Ethiopian Empire, the Mossi Kingdoms, and the Benin Empire.
Slave Holding Cell
Experience what it's like to be captured & put in a holding cell, Male/Female Dungeon... Waiting to be loaded onto the slave ship...Kept for sometimes months awaiting its arrival! Packed like cattle.
Unable to sit, and understand each other (Different tribes of people were purposely mixed together) without proper facilities for bathing, eating, or moving around.
Sometimes hundreds in a room barely big enough for a quarter of that many.
Captured, Enslaved & Mistreated repeatedly for over 400 years.
Generation after generation.
Boat Room
Auction Block
From the ship sometimes straight to the auction block.
Branded, greased with lard, fondled, poked, jeered at, sold away from what family members might have survived the brutal middle passage.
Sold like the hogs & molasses, & lumber for building, to work the fields, milk the cows, cook & clean & suckle the babies of their new slave masters from before sun up til after sundown day after day after month after year.
Abused & threatened daily.
