Founded in the 1860s as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants, in the mid-1960s District Six was declared a whites-only area under the 1950 Group Areas Act, the inhabitants forcibly relocated to barren land on the Cape Flats several kilometres away and their homes and livelihoods destroyed. The area, along with Johannesburg's Sophiatown, has since become one of the symbols of the cruelties of the apartheid regime. The District Six museum bears witness to the experience of its original residents and to the history of marginalisation and forced displacements more generally.