you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

NYC's Tenement Museum faces backlash after it REPLACES story of white Irish immigrants with woke tale of black New Jersey family who never even lived in the Lower East Side building

The Tenement Museum is facing backlash for scrubbing the history of the white immigrants who inhabited the building on Manhattan's Lower East Side with stories about black and other races that never stepped foot in its now-hallowed hallways.

Chief among the complaints is the museum replacing the story of an Irish family who resided at the building at 103 Orchard Street in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with that of a black man - who worked near the building and lived in New Jersey for much of his life.

When the museum opened in 1988, it was devoted to re-creating the immigrant experience of the more than 7,000 people who inhabited the 22 apartments in the five-story building during the 19th and 20th centuries.

During that time period, the inhabitants mirrored that of the nation's migration, beginning with the influx of Irish, then German, then Jewish and finally Italian immigrants. There is no historical evidence any black people lived in the cramped quarters of the building during that time period.

However, the museum has decided to set up one apartment in the tenement museum to re-create how a black man named Joseph Moore, and his wife, Rachel, lived at the time, and is revising all of its apartment tours to examine how race and racism shaped the opportunities of white immigrants.