The Pompey Museum occupies the Vendue House on Bay Street in Nassau, a building closely tied to the commerce of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic port. Constructed before 1769 and later altered, the arcaded market stood near the harbor where merchants bought and sold imported goods, produce, and other commodities. Enslaved Africans and people of African descent were also sold through Nassau's vendue system. The building's conversion into a museum places the history of slavery inside one of the urban spaces where human beings were treated as property.

Slavery shaped the Bahamas from the colonial plantation era through emancipation. Loyalists arriving after the American Revolution brought thousands of enslaved people and attempted to expand cotton cultivation on islands such as Exuma and Cat Island. Exhausted soils and hurricanes weakened plantations, but bondage remained central to households, maritime labor, salt production, agriculture, and trade. Nassau's free and enslaved Black majority created families, worshipped, hired out labor, pursued skilled occupations, negotiated limited autonomy, fled, and resisted within laws designed to preserve white ownership and punishment.

The museum is named for Pompey, an enslaved man on the Rolle plantation at Steventon, Exuma. In 1830, when owner John Rolle sought to transfer men, women, and children to another island, Pompey and others resisted the forced separation of their community. They seized a boat and traveled to Nassau to appeal to the governor. Authorities returned and punished participants, yet the removal was delayed. The episode demonstrates resistance through collective action, mobility, negotiation, and refusal, not only through large armed rebellion. It also explains why Pompey became a national symbol of freedom.

The British Parliament's Slavery Abolition Act took effect in the Bahamas in 1834, but most formerly enslaved adults entered a compulsory apprenticeship system that preserved employer control. Full emancipation came in 1838. Freedom did not deliver equal land, wages, education, or political power, and colonial institutions continued to privilege a white mercantile minority. Descendants built churches, lodges, schools, unions, and political movements that connected emancipation to later struggles for majority rule and independence, achieved in 1973. The Vendue House remained a commercial landmark as Nassau and Bay Street changed around it.

In the twentieth century the building served various public functions and survived deterioration, redevelopment pressure, and hurricane damage. It opened in 1992 as the Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation, part of a broader effort to center African-Bahamian history in national institutions. Exhibitions have used documents, objects, images, and interpretive displays to address the slave trade, plantation life, resistance, abolition, Junkanoo, and post-emancipation society. A serious fire in 2011 damaged the museum, prompting restoration and renewed discussion about protecting vulnerable collections and historic buildings.

The Pompey Museum's power comes from the relationship between place and subject: an elegant market building cannot be separated from the people once auctioned within Nassau's commercial system. Its interpretation also resists a story that ends neatly in 1834 or 1838. Emancipation was a legal turning point within a much longer pursuit of family security, cultural survival, land, work, citizenship, and historical recognition. By naming the museum for an enslaved resistor rather than a governor or merchant, the Bahamas reframed a colonial landmark around the agency and memory of the people its commerce exploited.