The Exhibit
Choosing to Participate creates opportunities for students, teachers, families, and community members to come together in conversation around complicated questions of prejudice and injustice and to identify ways to transform their communities.
The centerpiece of this initiative is a multimedia exhibition that will visit five cities around the country between 2009 and 2013. After a successful five month presentation in Cleveland, the Choosing to Participate exhibition will open in Washington, D.C. from January 2011 through May 2011.
Visitors to the exhibition will tour a series of multimedia installations about individuals and groups from contemporary American history who confront prejudice and injustice.
These stories illustrate the courage, initiative, and compassion needed to protect democracy and human rights and challenge visitors to consider connections to stories in their own lives and around the world:
- Little Things are Big tells of a decision made by a Puerto Rican man when, late one night, he encountered a white mother in need of assistance on the New York subway in the 1950s.
- Crisis in Little Rock describes the way people in the community responded to the integration of Central High School in 1957.
- Not in Our Town examines how citizens in Billings, Montana, came together to combat a series of hate crimes in 1993.
- Everyone Has a Story depicts the challenges faced by a young Cambodian refugee and people in his community as he struggled to build a new life in rural New Hampshire.
