From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement

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In the 1960s and 1970s the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to create museums that would make history and culture of African America more “public.” This is the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum inWashington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many with ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community. “Clearly written and concisely argued, From Storefront to Monument will be of great interest to scholars in the field of museum studies. It also deserves wide readership in the broader field of African American studies , where there has been no comparable work that offers an overarching history of the black museum movement as an important political movement.” —Renee Romano, coeditor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory ANDReA A. BuRNS is assistant professor of history at Appalachian State university. a volume in the series Public History in Historical Perspective Cover photo: Opening Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, 1967, photographer unknown (neg. #91-517). Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives Cover design by Sally Nichols uNIVeRSITY OF MASSACHuSeTTS PReSS Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress  ...