Levine Museum of the New South (Charlotte, NC)

The Levine Museum of the New South is located conveniently in the middle of downtown Charlotte. There is parking that can be validated for you when you pay for your admission. Tickets to get in are only $5 for a student, and I failed to take note of the other prices.

The main permanent exhibit is titled "From cotton fields to skyscrapers". It begins with an intriguing short film about Charlotte's post Civil War history. It addresses racism that was present, and how after the Civil War the races had very different life styles. The first room in the exhibit has a small cabin which represents what a sharecropper and their family would have lived in and in this cabin are very hands on. You can touch the bed, pick up the plates, etc. In this room is also a cotton gin that would have been used in this 1865-1885 timeframe, and the ugly history of the KKK is addressed. What Levine does bravely is it addresses how racism was spread through early movies, and the movies implied racial superiority that many people took to be true.

The next room has a slightly more advances Charlotte with a factory for spinning cotton into threads. There is another little example of a home from the time complete with a stocked pantry. In this room, the communities created in the mills are shown through photographs and how coworkers became the lifeblood of an entire neighborhood. Also touched upon is the tradition of courtship, which actually made it make slightly more sense to me as some, mostly religious, communities, still utilize this practice.

The third room of the exhibit shows a street in downtown Charlotte in the between Wars years. There is a small store to buy appliances of the day, a clothing store (with ADULT sized dress-up clothes), a radio recording studio, a chapel, and a barbershop. The best part about this section is how able the visitor is to interact with it. You can get dressed up in the clothing store, then go to the chapel, sit in the barer chair, or listen to the radio.

The fourth room, separated by a film about World War two, addresses the racial strife of the 1960s. There is a segregated water fountain, a small example of a living room of the day complete with a TV and TV dinners. There is even a counter representative of the sit ins that were held though the 1960s. A unique thing the museum did was it had about six different perspectives of racial integration and peoples beliefs of what should be done. There were radical KKK members and leaders of the Civil Rights Movements, and people in the middle.

The final piece of the exhibit explains how Charlotte became a center for banking during the 1980s, and how Charlotte culture has improved because of this, such as larger hospitals making Charlotte their home, as well as sporting events making a home in Charlotte.

To make a few notes about the permanent exhibit, the theme of the home in Charlotte through history was powerful, from the Sharecroppers home to the TV and TV dinners reflecting giant progress in only about a century. It's a poignant notion that, no pun intended, brings it home to visitors, because people can relate to a living room.

The temporary exhibits were about emergency preparedness and about cultural differences. The one about cultural differences I believe is a bit more permanent but not static in it's contents. It has a kitchen of what would be an Asian Indian-American family, indicating how there are Indian foods and spices, but those aren't the only contents. There is a small wardrobe of Indian sari's in adult and child sizes. Very cool in this exhibit is a wire representation of a tall man with markings on the floor indicating how close people stand in some countries compared to others. Also addressed is a strong Vietnamese and Hispanic cultures in Charlotte.

Levine Museum of the New South addresses the dark history of the south, but shows how at least this sprawling metropolis is attempting to become a city to compete with the north. The permanent exhibit has a lot to offer to people of many different age groups and kept me intrigued the entire time I was walking through. They take a risk in allowing people to pick up everything right down to the plates off the table, but it pays off, because it adds that much of a quality of "They had to eat/sleep/work too".