I'm bookmarking this because 1) seeing the name of the museum in a hilarious anti-racist blog was enough to stop me in my tracks, and 2) despite very different contexts, I think there are some parallels between this collection and the collections I'm looking at, in terms of the construction and preservation of "inadmissible" narrative and history (not because racism is over, though; because this evidence of racism and its direct relationship to contemporary white privilege is unwelcome) and the management of response to the collection's content. 

Curator David Pilgrim's essay, "The Garbage Man: Why I Collect Racist Objects," is a great read. Two excerpts: first a bit of his explanation of why it's easier to talk about slavery than Jim Crow; next, a passage about what it means to bring a dispersed, but pervasive, history together in a collection:

I have long felt that Americans, especially whites, would rather talk about slavery than Jim Crow. All ex-slaves are dead. They do not walk among us, their presence a reminder of that unspeakably cruel system. Their children are dead. Distanced by a century and a half, the modern American sees slavery as a regrettable period when blacks worked without wages. Slavery was, of course, much worse. It was the complete domination of one people by another people -- with the expected abuses that accompany unchecked power. Slavers whipped slaves who displeased them. Clergy preached that slavery was the will of God. Scientists "proved" that blacks were less evolved, a subspecies of the human race -- politicians agreed. Teachers taught young children that blacks were inherently less intelligent. Laws forbade slaves, and sometimes free blacks, from reading, writing, owning money, and arguing with whites. Slaves were property -- thinking, suffering property. The passing of a century and a half affords the typical American enough "psychological space" to deal with slavery; when that is not sufficient, a sanitized version of slavery is embraced.

The horrors of Jim Crow are not so easily ignored. The children of Jim Crow walk among us, and they have stories to tell. They remember Emmitt Till, murdered in 1955, for whistling at a white woman. Long before the tragic bombings of September 11, 2001, blacks that lived under Jim Crow were acquainted with terrorism. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a black church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. Twenty-three people were hurt, and four girls were killed. The blacks who grew up during the Jim Crow period can tell you about this bombing -- and many others. Blacks who dared protest the indignities of Jim Crow were threatened, and when the threats did not work, subjected to violence, including bombings. The children of Jim Crow can talk about the Scottsboro boys, the Tuskegee Experiment, lynchings, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, and they have stories about the daily indignities that befell blacks who lived in towns where they were not respected or wanted.

Yes, many of us would rather talk about slavery than Jim Crow because a discussion of Jim Crow begs the question: "What about today?"

[...]

A seminal event occurred in 1991. A colleague told me about an elderly black woman who had a large collection of black-related objects. I will call her Mrs. Haley. She was an antique dealer in a small Indiana town. I visited her and told her about my collection. She seemed unimpressed. I described how I used the racist objects to teach students about racism. Again, she was not impressed. Her store displayed a few pieces of racist memorabilia. I asked if she kept most of the "black material" at her home. She said that she kept those pieces in the back, but I could only see them if I agreed to a condition, namely, I could never "pester" her to sell me any of the objects. I agreed. She locked the front door, put the "closed" sign in the window, and motioned for me to follow her.

If I live to be 100 I will never forget the feeling that I had when I saw her collection; it was sadness, a thick, cold sadness. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of objects, side-by-side, on shelves that reached to the ceiling. All four walls were covered with some of the most racist objects imaginable. I owned some of the objects, others I had seen in Black Memorabilia price guides, and others were so rare I have not seen them since. I was stunned. Sadness. It was as if I could hear the pieces talking, yowling. Every conceivable distortion of black people, our people, was on display. It was a chamber of horrors. She did not talk. She stared at me; I stared at the objects. One was a life-sized wooden figure of a black man, grotesquely caricatured. It was a testament to the creative energy that often lurks behind racism. On her walls was a material record of all the hurt and harm done to Africans and their American descendants. I wanted to cry. It was at that moment that I decided to create a museum.

I visited her often. She liked me because I was "from down home." She told me that in the 1960s and 1970s many whites gave her racist objects. They did not want to be identified with racism. They were embarrassed. That sentiment changed in the mid-1980s. Several price guides devoted solely to racist collectibles were published. The price guides helped create the contemporary market for racist collectibles. Each new price guide showed prices escalating, and a national pursuit of racist items ensued. Mrs. Haley's collection was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but she had no desire to sell the pieces. They were our past, America's past. "We mustn't forget, baby," she said, without even a hint of anger. I stopped visiting after a year or so, she died, and I heard that her collection was sold to private dealers. That broke my heart on several levels. It bothers me that she did not live to see the museum she helped inspire.