Student-led Black History Museum highlights Great Migration

Riley Kelly, School News Network

Grand Rapids — Most are pretty familiar with the stories of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. So this year during Black History Month, students at Union High School opted to shine a light on some of the aspects of Black culture and history that tend to get less attention.

At the end of February, a group of Union students hosted the second annual Black History Museum, a student-led pop-up exhibition highlighting key elements of the Black experience. 

The theme for this year’s museum was the Great Migration, the mass movement of Black Americans from the U.S. South to the North in search of economic opportunity and freedom from racial violence. The one-day museum featured student-run booths exploring the migration, why it took place and the impact it had on expanding Black cuisine, fashion, music and more throughout the nation. 

“The whole museum was going into the Great Migration, and how our people, our music and just the culture in general migrated somewhere else because of the things they didn’t like, and didn’t want to continue to go through, like slavery or discrimination or not being treated humanely in general,” said junior Trinity Lyons, one of about 14 Union students who participated in this year’s museum.

Trinity, along with senior Nathan Mayfield III and sophomore Isaiah Terry, spoke to SNN about why the Black History Museum was important, why they wanted to be a part of it and the impact they hoped it had.

“It was an opportunity for Black students to showcase about their history,” said Nathan, who added that it was important for the group to focus on things that don’t often come up in the history books.

Continue reading.

Learn how the Great Migration helped build Black metropolises in cities like Milwaukee and beyond.

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