Jim Crow Museum Expansion

Expanding our Facility and our Impact

Help the Jim Crow Museum tell a larger story.

A Message from Dr. David Pilgrim, Founder and Curator

I bought my first piece of racist memorabilia when I was about 12 years old in Mobile, Alabama. It was a salt-n-pepper shaker. Today, some people would call the object black memorabilia—but that label hides the ugliness that it represented. I broke it. In the years that followed, I bought similar objects: two- and three-dimensional items that caricatured, mocked, and belittled Black people. I did not break those pieces. Instead, I began a lifelong quest to collect as many of these objects as I could afford to use as teaching tools. As a young professor, I showed my students the objects I had collected. We sought to understand the many ways that these objects reflected and shaped attitudes toward African Americans.

In 2012, we opened the current iteration of the Jim Crow Museum on the campus of Ferris State University. Woodbridge Nathan Ferris, the founder of our university, was committed to making this world better. That is a commitment shared by and lived out in the work of the Jim Crow Museum. We take objects that were meant for harm, we contextualize their role in our nation’s past, and we use them to facilitate the conversations that will help us, as Americans, avoid the mistakes of the past. This anti-racism facility is a shrine to the resiliency of African Americans, not a shrine to racism. Every day we have the conversations Americans need to have about race and race relations with our visitors. In 2021, the public is seeking trusted resources to better understand race, race relations, and racism. African Americans still endure the consequences and injustices of a racist past. The museum and its staff have years of experience in engaging in civil discourse with those of all backgrounds, races, colors, or creeds through challenging history and confrontational objects. They are experts in deploying the museum’s collection to share history, facilitate dialogue, and teach tolerance to the world. As our schools, communities, and institutions strive to foster healing and grapple with uncomfortable and challenging dialogues, Ferris State University is planning, designing, and constructing a new Jim Crow Museum, Archive, and Research Center.

Our new facility and accompanying programs will expand access to the museum’s resources, enhance preservation efforts, and amplify the work of our mission – to use objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote a more just society moving forward. A better America is possible, and it will be led by the thoughtful people who are not caught up in happy history – people that see the wrongs of the past and seek to repair the world.

We need dedicated champions who will help us move the important work of the museum forward. I hope you join us.

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Why Expansion?

Educators, politicians, police officers, community leaders, documentarians, researchers, and national media outlets seek out the Jim Crow Museum's expertise to help understand and interpret the enduring impact of racism in our nation and around the world. Every week, the museum receives requests to contribute to stories about race, race relations, and racism. Racist artifacts and narratives are received by mail from donors every day. The Jim Crow Museum’s holdings have expanded into the world’s largest and most robust collection of material culture objects representing the history, consequences, and current iterations of Jim Crow-era racism including over 14,000 artifacts. The collection includes a variety of artifacts with origins spanning from reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and new objects from the present-day. The size and variety of the collection has earned the Jim Crow Museum national and global recognition for its academic and historical value.

The museum and its staff use the collection to share history and teach tolerance to the world. Dr. Pilgrim and his staff published several books, generated over 17 million engagements via social media and online videos, continue to share two traveling exhibits, provide tours of the museum’s exhibitions in-person and through online virtual tours, present at numerous regional and national conferences every year, open the collection to visiting scholars, and provide educational programs to schools, universities, corporations, police departments, religious institutions, and community organizations. Given the increased national attention to the roots of systemic racism in the United States, Dr. Pilgrim and his team have become leading resources for major media outlets including CNN, ABC, and NBC to discuss race, racism, and the importance of the museum’s collections in understanding our country’s challenging history.

The museum's success has led us to recognize our extremely limited capacity to sustain growth. Museums are vital arenas for learning, exploring, and negotiating the complex relationships of modern society, not just repositories of “things.” We plan to construct a new state of the art facility that will expand the museum exhibits and narratives to increase the size and impact of the collection, preserve the irreplaceable items, and expand the accessibility of the collection to serve more audiences. The museum team has begun the planning and design process to expand the organizational capacity of the Jim Crow Museum in terms of facilities, technology, and staffing to advance the museum's mission: Using objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice.

Why Big Rapids?