Making a Way Out of No Way: the National Museum of African American History and Culture

Fig. 1.

Ensemble associated with Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert. Collection of the Smithsonian NMAAHC, Gift of Ginette DePreist in memory of James DePreist.

© National Museum of African American History and Culture

American History is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

James Baldwin, 1963¹

A DREAM A CENTURY IN THE MAKING

On 24 September 2016, thousands gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to witness the dedication of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The opening of the museum marked a new chapter for the Smithsonian and for the nation. For the first time, African American history and culture would be a central part of the nation’s story at the symbolic heart of the country next to the Washington Monument and in the shadow of the White House, as part of the largest complex of museums in the world.

Though chartered by President George W. Bush in 2003 and commemorated by President Barack Obama in 2016, the journey to open the museum had taken a century. In 1915, fifty years after the end of the U.S. Civil War, veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the occasion. Among those who gathered were African American soldiers who had proudly fought under the Union flag. But by 1915 the cause these men had fought for-to end slavery and secure freedom and equal citizenship – had been eclipsed by racial discrimination, the persistence, reformulation and resurgence of white supremacy, and the erasure of African American sacrifice and contributions to the nation.

The following year a ‘Committee of Colored Citizens’ launched a campaign to honour the contributions of African American soldiers and established an association to promote and raise funds for the construction of a National Negro Memorial, and subsequently, Museum, in Washington. Years of fundraising and lobbying resulted in a resolution signed by President Coolidge in the late 1920s, but the onset of the Great Depression curtailed plans and foreclosed any momentum for the project for decades. The dream for a national museum resurged in the late 1960s and was sustained through political and grassroots activism over the next several decades led in part by Congressman Mickey Leland. It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that the National African American Museum Project was established at the Smithsonian to identify potential collections and develop exhibition and programming plans for a new museum. After ten years of blocked and stalled legislation on the part of the U.S. Congress, a breakthrough came in 2001. A bipartisan coalition led by stalwart museum champion Congressman John Lewis, along with Representative J.C. Watts and Senators Max Cleland and Sam Brownback, succeeded in passing a bill to establish a presidential commission that resulted in the public law signed by President Bush chartering the museum.

This journey to build the National Museum of African American History and culture was not easy and at times it seemed that it would never be more than a dream; but it had reached a crucial point. The appointment of Lonnie Bunch in 2005 as the Museum’s founding director, along with the staff he subsequently assembled, made it possible for that generations-long dream, often seemingly futile, to become a reality.

THROUGH THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LENS—A MUSEUM FOR ALL PEOPLE

In 2005 the Museum began without a collection, a site, a building, or a set of exhibition plans. What did exist were all the questions, challenges and concerns that had circulated in the preceding years and decades about the existence of the museum and about what a National Museum of African American History and Culture could or should be. Should this museum be part of the Smithsonian, a federal institution and one with a history of conflicted interests when it came to telling hard truths? If black history were part of the nation’s museum complex, shouldn’t it...