10/02/2026
Michigan is now home to a $22 million museum built around an uncomfortable idea: racist objects from America’s past can become tools for understanding that history instead of hiding it.
The new Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery opened Sept. 30 at Ferris State University in Big Rapids. Its 26,000-square-foot building houses more than 30,000 artifacts collected over decades by museum founder David Pilgrim and through donations from across the country.
But Pilgrim says the museum is not simply displaying racist caricatures and objects. Exhibits also focus on Black Americans who resisted those images through achievement, activism and everyday dignity.
“Witness, understand, heal” is the theme.
The museum traces the Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement while examining how racist imagery helped dehumanize Black Americans. Its centerpiece is a 7,500-square-foot exhibit gallery, joined by a library reading room, seminar space and recording studio where visitors can preserve stories about Jim Crow’s effects across generations.
Even the building carries meaning. A steel veil around part of the exterior references W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “the veil,” representing separation and the experience of being viewed through racism rather than one’s full humanity.
The collection has come a remarkable distance. The original museum opened at Ferris State in the 1990s in a room measuring just 500 square feet. It later expanded to 3,500 square feet before this standalone facility was developed.
More than three decades later, Michigan has given that collection room to do what Pilgrim intended from the beginning: teach difficult history by confronting it directly.
