Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture > Exhibitions

Lest We Forget: The Triumph over Slavery

From June 3, 2000 through March 31, 2001
Exhibition Hall and Latimer/Edison Gallery
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, NY 10037-1801 (directions)

Based on recent scholarship, Lest We Forget: The Triumph over Slavery, the Schomburg Center's inaugural 75th Anniversary exhibition, acknowledges the oppression, exploitation, and victimization that characterized the transatlantic slave trade and 400 years of slavery in the Americas. "While we could not ignore the brutality and inhumanity of the slave trade and of slavery itself," Schomburg Center Director Howard Dodson notes, "this exhibition emphasizes the triumph over slavery by focusing on the ways in which African peoples throughout the Americas invented themselves, and created their diverse languages, religions, and families. It also focuses on their forms of political, economic, and cultural organization during and immediately after slavery. Its larger goal is to assist the public in understanding these extraordinary processes."

Lest We Forget: The Triumph over Slavery includes more than 300 objects and documents drawn from the rich and diverse collections of the Schomburg Center, as well as from other repositories and private collections. It is produced in conjunction with the UNESCO Slave Route Project, a ten-year United Nations initiative to heighten awareness of the centrality of the slave trade in the making of the modern world. The exhibit is made possible in part by support from the Consolidated Edison Co. of N.Y., Inc.

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