When Slavery Reigned : History: The Museum of the Confederacy has compiled comprehensive documentation of Southern black life before the Civil War.

You can see it in their eyes--anger, hurt and frustration. The psychic scar of slavery marks each of the faces pictured in a display at the Museum of the Confederacy.

“Before Freedom Came,” an exhibit on American slave life, takes the visitor on a walk through courage, creativity and the triumph of the human spirit.

The exhibition is described as the country’s most comprehensive documentation of Southern black life in the days before the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom. The project was 10 years in the making.

The photos are among 320 objects from 82 institutions and individuals gathered by the museum built in what once was the back yard of the Confederate White House.

“A lot of people were skeptical about whether there would be enough stuff to do this type of exhibit,” curator Kym S. Rice said. “They felt the majority culture in the South was so strong that the minority culture--the African-American culture--was obliterated by whites.

“In any situation where one culture has dominance over another, the evidence of the other culture just doesn’t survive to the same extent,” she said.

Little effort was made to preserve items used by slaves. They got broken or buried over time. Museum officials sent inquiries worldwide for artifacts.

Marbles were found in archeological digs at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home near Charlottesville.

A sliver of a toothbrush came from the Kingsley plantation quarter at Ft. George Island, Fla. Leg irons were donated by a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch Cos.

A red-and-white chalice quilt made by Texas slaves about 1860 was found in the American Museum at Bath, England.

Rice’s most treasured find--an ivory sculpture of a former slave named Nora August--came from the Sea Island Golf Club on the Georgia coast.

“I went to St. Simons Island in Georgia to go to the museum there, and in the course of looking at what they had, the director said there was a golf club with an incredible sculpture.

“I went to see it--I couldn’t believe it,” Rice said. “It was at a country club, in a glass case outside the gift shop. . . . The golf club bought it because it was built on the remains of the Retreat plantation.”

The owners probably didn’t understand the historical significance of their carving, she said. “They do now.”

Museum officials said it was likely Nora was carved by a black Union soldier. The area was captured by Union troops early in the war.

Clay Dye, museum spokesman, said the show has touched black and white visitors alike.

“They were able to create the things they did despite the hardship,” Dye said.

Some say an exhibit on slavery doesn’t belong in the Museum of the Confederacy. Sa’ad El-Amin, a Richmond attorney, told the Richmond Afro-American newspaper that the museum was trying to exploit slavery for its own “professional and fiscal advancement.”

“The museum of the Holocaust is in Israel, not in Germany,” he said.

But visitors and museum officials disagree.

“It’s a big part of the South,” said Georgia Wert, a Miami resident in town to visit relatives. “You couldn’t tell the story of the South without telling the story of slavery.”

She said it’s important that the story of slavery be told, “so nothing like this ever happens again.”

Nearly half the population of the pre-Civil War South was black.

“I think it’s perfectly appropriate for the museum to be looking at the black experience,” Rice said. “This exhibit is drawing white visitors as well as African-Americans. It’s important for all Americans to know about the contributions of African-Americans.”