We at The G. C. and Frances Hawley Museum® - I Remember Our History®, focus on revealing the whole truths about the inhumane destructive violence that shaped America and continues to keep that shape of America.

Teaching the history that was hidden and erased on purpose, we provide a platform for the life stories of the traumatized enslaved and freed Black people. We shine a light of truth on how we were forced to compromise and assimilate to the White American rules of law and to the unequal justice that continues today.

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Image: Signs Used During Jim/Jane Crow Era In Every State In America.
Source: EJI

Words on image:
"The Jim Crow era and the courageous movement to confront racial segregation is presented with an extensive exploration of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the work of legendary civil rights activists.

The iconography of Jim Crow is dramatically presented in a collection of actual signs and notices collected from around the country. EJI also compiled laws and statutes that codified racial apartheid in America for visitors to read and experience."

Continued from EJI:

"The Story: Slavery Evolved. To justify the brutal, dehumanizing institution of slavery in America, its advocates created a myth of racial difference. Stereotypes and false characterizations of Black people were created to defend their permanent enslavement as “most necessary to the well-being of the negro” – an act of kindness that reinforced white supremacy. The formal abolition of slavery did nothing to overcome the harmful ideas created to defend it, and so slavery did not end: it evolved.

In the decades that followed, these beliefs in racial hierarchy took new expression in convict leasing, lynching, and other forms of racial terrorism that forced the exodus of millions of Black Americans to the North and West, where the myth of racial difference manifested in urban ghettos and generational poverty.

Racial subordination was codified and enforced by violence in the era of Jim Crow and segregation, as the nation and its leaders allowed Black people to be burdened, beaten, and marginalized throughout the 20th century.

Progress towards civil rights for African Americans was made in the 1960s, but the myth of racial inferiority was not eradicated. Black Americans were vulnerable to a new era of racial bias and abuse of power wielded by our contemporary criminal justice system.

Mass incarceration has had devastating consequences for people of color: at the dawn of the 21st century, one in three Black boys are projected to go to jail or prison in his lifetime."