In honor of Black History Month, the Matheson History Museum will debut a new exhibition to the public Tuesday.
The museum will examine the hidden histories of sites on the Florida Black Heritage Trail in and around Alachua County.
The free exhibition, titled “Long Road to Freedom: The Florida Black Heritage Trail,” will examine some of the historic landmarks commissioned for preservation in Florida, said Rebecca Fitsimmons, a Matheson curator and archivist. The museum exhibit will be accompanied by visiting guest speakers throughout February and March.
Fitsimmons said she believes the exhibition will be meaningful for the public.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to explain a lot of the complexities related to quite a long span of history within this state,” she said. “My hope is that people will come in and become interested and inspired to maybe learn on their own about some element that they found intriguing or peaked their curiosity.”
Fitsimmons said she has put together an exhibit including powerful images, documents and photographs, as well as interactive voice recordings.
Peggy Macdonald, the executive director at the Matheson, said the exhibition would revolve around landmarks both marked and unmarked.
“On the Florida Black Heritage Trail, there are physical buildings that still exist like the Cotton Club, and that’ll be part of our exhibition, but there are other landmarks that have gone, such as the Union Academy, which was the Freedmen’s Union school that was built here after the Civil War in Gainesville,” Macdonald said. “Although the Union Academy building is no longer there, the site is important, and there’s no historical marker.”
Macdonald said the museum hopes the exhibition will lead to a community partnership to create a historical marker at Union Academy.
The first event planned at the Matheson for the exhibition will be today at 6 p.m. It will be a panel presentation on Rosewood, a part of Florida in Levy County that was home to a racial riot and atrocity in January 1923. Three Rosewood history experts — Gary Moore, David Colburn and Sherry DuPree — will present on the hidden history of the Rosewood area.
Gary Moore, a journalist and the author of the new book, “Rosewood: The Full Story,” will be the highlighted speaker of the event and will participate in a book signing, Macdonald said. Moore was the first reporter to unearth the story of Rosewood in 1982. The Rosewood atrocity resulted in the deaths of six individuals and the destruction of a community.
“The focus of his work is deciphering what really did happen at Rosewood,” Macdonald said. “He is also trying to preserve evidence of the Rosewood atrocity through his book and otherwise. It’s important work that needs to be done.”
The darker history of Rosewood, as well as the history of the Newberry Six — a case in which six individuals were brutally lynched in 1916 — are two tragic pieces of Florida history that the Matheson will examine as part of the exhibition, Macdonald said.
“We want to examine even the more uncomfortable parts of history so that we can learn from them and question where we are today, how far we’ve come and how far we have to go,” Macdonald said.
