The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic has fixed a Halifax Explosion exhibit that contained inaccurate information about Africville.
Last week, Troy Adams, an African-Nova Scotian actor who was performing a play about the Halifax Explosion at the museum, publicly complained about the error.
The day CBC News published the story, the museum's curator, Roger Marsters, apologized to Adams and took immediate steps to correct the information to better reflect the African-Nova Scotian experience of the explosion.
Two thousand people died and 9,000 were injured on Dec. 6, 1917, when a munitions ship caught fire, causing a massive explosion in Halifax Harbour.
Erroneous panel replaced
The original panel said that Africville, which was located on the shore of Bedford Basin before the community was razed in the 1960s, was "largely sheltered by high ground" during the explosion and that only one person died.
The panel has since been replaced with a new one containing information about Africville's first black settlers and saying that the explosion "sent a storm of wreckage" through Africville.
"Seaview Baptist Church, at the community's centre, was heavily damaged," the new panel reads. "No fewer than eight African-Nova Scotians were killed in the explosion; at least four were from Africville."
[Curator Roger] Marsters said the original panel was installed in 1994 when the museum first developed its permanent Halifax Explosion exhibit,
Halifax Wrecked.
"It reflected the knowledge of those who were preparing the panel at the time," Marsters said Tuesday. "Subsequent research has shown that information to be inadequate and inaccurate. And so we felt it was incumbent upon us to replace it..."
From CBC News