From the New York Times on the Sit In Museum

Four Men, a Counter and Soon, Revolution

…what was at stake — not subtle and arcane matters of law or obscure practices that challenged eccentric codes of behavior, but the basic acts of daily life: eating, drinking, sleeping, working, playing.

…just the sight of signs of Jim Crow segregation in an opening gallery is chilling, with declarations of “White Only” or “For Colored” joined by one earlier sign announcing a slave auction. “Plenty of good Negroes,” it proclaims, “non-quality sold by the dozen.” With such an example, the sarcasm of the display — the signs are seen behind a scrim of the American flag and the words “All men are created equal” — seems bluntly superfluous.

…On fractured frames and accompanied by sound effects of water hoses or tree limbs creaking with the weight of lynched bodies are horrific photographs of racist violence: the 1930 lynching of two men in Marion, Ind.; the 1919 burning of the body of a black man, Will Brown, in Omaha; police dogs attacking protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963; the swollen, battered face of Emmett Till at his open-coffin funeral in Chicago in 1955. The images enforce a visceral sense of the brutish racial hatred at work.

…There are images of segregated buses, want ads specifying the race of the desired employee, a sign from a Birmingham theater (“Colored must sit in balcony”), the door from a bathroom of a Greensboro store labeled “Colored Women.”

A 1941 “Negro Motorist Green-Book,” published for black tourists, is on display, resembling an AAA guide, listing establishments in every state and major city that would welcome them: hotels, restaurants, garages, beauty parlors, haberdashers.

…black churches and the scope of the attacks on them, the segregation of hospitals and medical care, the baleful effects of separate and unequal education.

Edward Rothstein

New York Times, January 31, 2010