Last month, Nicole Anderson-Cobb examined the relationship between Museum of the Grand Prairie and the African American community through their current civil rights exhibit. She did so as a Pulitzer Center For Crisis Reporting Grantee for the Prairie State Museums Project (an initiative of Resilient Heritage): The Impact of COVID-19 on Illinois Museums.
In her two part series looking at the different aspects of the exhibit, she questioned the disconnect between hosting the exhibit in a predominately white village of Mahomet and the Black community having access to the collection.
They do have one way to bridge the gap. For four years now, the museum has been creating learning tubs for teachers to check out and use with students. They currently have two featuring materials related to the civil rights era.* From a Mahomet Daily article: “The Museum has put together two civil rights boxes full of children’s books, secondary photographs and information about what happened locally during the 1950’s and 60’s as the nation worked towards social justice.”
The tubs can be used in the classroom or with online learning. You can read more about them here.
Photo by Dani Tietz of Mahomet Daily.
*Editor’s note: We originally reported that these tubs were newly created. It has since come to our attention that these had been established prior to the aforementioned article series.