Qualla: National Museum of African American History and Culture

National Museum of African American History and Culture: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ACE-IT NAB, Public domain. In 1915, Black Union Army veterans gathered at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington for a reunion and a parade. Fifty years after Appomattox, they had grown old in a country that still excluded them from much of its public life. The veterans wanted a memorial - some lasting acknowledgment, in the capital they had fought to preserve, of what they and other African Americans had achieved. They formed a committee. They wrote letters. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover finally appointed Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, and ten others to a federal commission charged with building a National Memorial Building. Congress declined to fund it. Private fundraising failed. The idea did not die. It would take another 87 years - through World War II, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, and the Obama presidency - before the National Museum of African American History and Culture finally opened on the National Mall in September 2016.

Image: ACE-IT NAB | Public domain

National Museum of African American History and Culture: A Hundred Years of Proposals

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. After Hoover's commission failed in the 1930s, proposals for a Black history museum surfaced in Congress repeatedly over the next four decades. None gained meaningful support. In 1981, Congress finally approved a federal charter for the National Afro-American Museum, but located ...

Image: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

National Museum of African American History and Culture: The Long Legislative Push

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Black members of Congress - including Leland, John Lewis, and Eddie Bernice Johnson - kept introducing bills to authorize a national African American history museum. The bills stalled, sometimes over questions of jurisdiction within the Smiths...

Image: Frank Schulenburg | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Museum of African American History and Culture: Adjaye's Corona

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2006, the Smithsonian selected a five-acre site on the National Mall just east of the Washington Monument - prime ground on the country's most prestigious public space. In 2009, after an international design competition, a joint team led by Ghanaian-British architect David Adj...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

National Museum of African American History and Culture: September 24, 2016

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Wallroth, CC BY 3.0. Construction began in 2012. The building was completed in 2016 at a cost of approximately $540 million, financed through a mix of federal appropriation and private philanthropy. Lonnie Bunch III, the museum's founding director, had been recruited from the Chicago Historical Socie...

Image: Sebastian Wallroth | CC BY 3.0

National Museum of African American History and Culture: Forty Thousand Objects

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Raul654, CC BY-SA 3.0. The collection holds more than 40,000 objects, though only about 3,500 are displayed at any given time. Items range from a slave cabin from Edisto Island, South Carolina - relocated and reassembled inside the museum's basement - to Chuck Berry's red Cadillac, to a hymnal owned by...

Image: User:Raul654 | CC BY-SA 3.0