Confederacy museum struggles not to be relic of the past
RICHMOND, Va. -- This is what the Museum of the Confederacy, the onetime "Shrine of the South," has come down to:
Attendance has dropped by nearly half over the past decade. The museum has been losing about $400,000 each year for a decade. Employees have been laid off, hours curtailed. A recent report by a panel of outside experts in museum management concluded that the 117-year-old institution was at a "tipping point" that was going to affect "its very existence."
And this is in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Things are so bleak that the museum will likely have to sell its $7 million site to raise cash. It needed a $400,000 emergency grant from the state legislature earlier this month to allow it more time to look for a new home.
It may even have to change its name. That same doleful report said the Museum of the Confederacy, though it has made efforts to distance itself from being an unabashed shrine, still "conjures up in the public mind images of slavery, racism, and intolerance...[It] carries enormous, intransigent, and negative intellectual and emotional baggage."
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Attendance has dropped by nearly half over the past decade. The museum has been losing about $400,000 each year for a decade. Employees have been laid off, hours curtailed. A recent report by a panel of outside experts in museum management concluded that the 117-year-old institution was at a "tipping point" that was going to affect "its very existence."
And this is in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Things are so bleak that the museum will likely have to sell its $7 million site to raise cash. It needed a $400,000 emergency grant from the state legislature earlier this month to allow it more time to look for a new home.
It may even have to change its name. That same doleful report said the Museum of the Confederacy, though it has made efforts to distance itself from being an unabashed shrine, still "conjures up in the public mind images of slavery, racism, and intolerance...[It] carries enormous, intransigent, and negative intellectual and emotional baggage."