Imagine a major museum with a big historical story to tell selling its building to a real-estate developer and moving into a space smaller than the average retail storefront and reproducing its collection mainly as posters and pictures.
If you think that’s unlikely, you haven’t yet meant the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina. That’s the older site above; it was sold in 2021 with the idea of moving to a larger space, but that hasn’t happened, at least not yet.
The present space is filled with attractive posters and excellent description of the museum’s scope and subject, but it’s well under an hour of museum on a range of topics that are fascinating and important: How the South changed after the Civil War from nearly all-agriculture and reliance on enslaved labor to a mixed agricultural and industrial economy, and how that transition was, and is, inflected by conflicts of race and class—and how those conflicts were often encouraged to the benefit of the wealthy.
Charlotte is the museum’s focus, taken as an exemplar of the southern cities that had their great growth in the post-Civil War era—Atlanta and Birmingham to name a couple of others. The concept of the ‘New South’ and its name came from Atlanta’s Henry W. Grady and like-minded men who argued that the South could no longer rely solely on supplying raw materials to others, and that it must develop industry as well. Grady wrote that “The Old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth.” As progressive as that might sound, Grady also wrote “I declare that the white race must dominate forever in the South.”
So-called ‘Redeemers’ took control of most southern governments with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, but continued poverty and inequality led to the growth of a Fusion movement of poor white farmers and workers with black and white Republicans that succeeded in winning state elections in the early 1890s—until the New South forces and others launched racist campaigns to split the movement, encouraged the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and passed a wide range of Jim Crow laws.
The story of Charlotte and the New South, and the conflicts arising over the years continues—but that’s an awful lot of history to reduce to placards. This is a museum and a story that needs and deserves the room to return to three-dimensional exhibits, to objects and to more room for exploration.
The museum explores the hard life of field workers and mill workers, including the many strikes by cotton mill workers, often ended by government intervention, with the National Guard called to disperse strikers. There are also exhibits about the public institutions developed, separately, by Charlotte’s segregated citizens:
Other exhibits highlight the work and roles of civic leaders and pioneers in the Charlotte area.
But the museum’s exhibits make clear that conflict, change and unresolved issues are not all in the distant past. It recounts the history of civil rights and integration struggles in Charlotte in the past century…
… but it also points out continuing historic separation of the city’s neighborhoods, created by Jim Crow, and in more recent years extended by highway and urban renewal projects that separated some neighborhoods, and destroyed others—a theme that can be seen in so many museums of 20th century history and so many lives and cities.
An interactive station allows a bit of hands-on exploration of neighborhood issues
And there’s even room for a little bit of local boosterism about Charlotte’s cultural institutions—which is ironic, considering how small a boost this important museum has been given! Hopefully it will eventually get the space and support it deserves. In the meantime, it’s still very much worth a visit.
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