The Museum of the American Revolution will display Thomas Jefferson’s chair and Martin Luther King’s prison bench

When envisioning its major exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, the Museum of the American Revolution sought out objects that represent the document’s enduring power, complexity, and unfilled promise.

Two of those items, the museum said on Monday, will be the plain, old-fashioned chair that Thomas Jefferson used while drafting the Declaration in Philadelphia in 1776, and the hard metal prison bench from which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. composed his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963.

“Two very different pieces of seating furniture … that grapple with important moments in American history,” said senior curator of the Revolution Museum, Matthew Skic. “A direct way of prompting that the American Revolution, as we see it today, the experiment in liberty, equality, and self-government sparked in the 18th century, is unfinished and yet enduring.”

The museum’s announcement represents the first details of its acquisitions for The Declaration’s Journey, running from Oct. 18 through Jan. 3, 2027, and billed as one of the key public events in Philly’s celebration of America’s Semiquincentennial.

The museum also announced additional grant funding for the long-planned exhibit, including a combined $600,000 from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Four years in the making, “The Declaration’s Journey” will include about 100 other objects exploring how the Declaration inspired revolutions and freedom movements through the centuries — and how leaders from Frederick Douglas to King and Eleanor Roosevelt to Harvey Milk deployed its powerful words in fights for rights.

But it will be the chair and the bench that first greet visitors. Artists have long explored the powerful link between Jefferson and King. Most notably on the National Mall, where King’s monument gazes across the Tidal Basin at the Jefferson Memorial. The exhibit will represent the first time the two iconic relics have ever been displayed side-by-side

“We want this juxtaposition to be a signpost that this exhibition is not just a story about 1776,” Skic said. “It begins in 1776, but then shows the journey that the Declaration has symbolically gone on.”

Built from poplar and mahogany and other woods, the Windsor chair is believed to be the one Jefferson used in his Market Street boardinghouse during that hot and world-changing summer of 1776. He then brought the chair back to his Monticello home, where he eventually altered it to include a swivel and writing arm.

After Jefferson died in 1826, his eldest daughter eventually gave the chair to a Philly lawyer, and later attorney general of Pennsylvania, John Kintzing Kane. He then donated the chair to the American Philosophical Society, across from Independence Hall, where it has since been housed. The APS will loan the chair to the Revolution Museum until March 2026, when it will be replaced by another chair owned by Jefferson, and displayed back at the APS.

It was the height of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 when King sat down to write on the simple steel prison bench. He had gone to Birmingham to lead a new campaign of nonviolent resistance and boycotts, and expected to be jailed. He penned his famous missive during a weeklong prison stay, first on margins of newspaper and scraps of papers from guards, and then a writing pad supplied by his lawyer.

In the open letter, King hearkens back to Jefferson’s own words, arguing that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting for justice.

The two objects make for “a remarkable juxtaposition,” said Michelle McDonald, director of the American Philosophical Society’s Library & Museum.

“It brings this idea of 18th-century promise, incomplete promise, and puts it next to King and the 20th century Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “And that was what Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement was — an absolute reckoning of taking the same language, the same ideals, and saying, ‘but now it’s time to make good.’”