Pop-up museum explores past and future of civil rights

In celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Center for Social Impact set out to educate students on the empowering history of the civil rights movement with a pop-up museum.

The colorful and interactive display explored the pathways of social impact work during the Civil Rights Movement. Each pathway was represented by a different color, creating an eye-catching and engaging display.

“This is amazing. It’s so important for us to learn about,” Naif Alsulqi, a freshman in the ASL program, said.

The displays focused on the Center’s categories for social impact: entrepreneurship; direct service; community-engaged learning and research; policy and governance and philanthropy.

“When we came up with the museum idea, we wanted to create something that would catch people’s eye, but would also be really informative,” Summer Valente, director of the Center for Social Impact, said. “We used the color of the pathways to visually represent how it took a combination of lots of different kinds of efforts to make the movement a success.”

The displays invited students to reflect upon the impact the civil rights movement made on the world.

Travis Knight, a senior studying Criminal Justice, said that it’s important to learn about the civil rights movement.“In today’s world, we see people using violence to promote change. It’s important to look at Martin Luther King and see that violence is not the way to make change happen.”  

The goal of the display was to educate students on the past of the civil rights movement and explain the path for the future of the movement.

“With this exhibit, we really hope to communicate how solving social issues requires working together across all the pathways of social impact,” Valente said.