A Place of our Own: The National Museum of African American History and Culture

Summary

• Likely one of the last museums constructed on the National Mall, the National Museum of African American History and Culture will be the most significant artistic statement made in Washington, DC over the next decade. The museum is dedicated to documenting and interpreting the centrality if the African American experience in the making of America and Americans and has been a long time in the making. Beginning just over a century before their vision would come to fruition, black Civil War veterans started a quest to commemorate African American's role in the making of America.
• Though the success of their nation-wide grassroots efforts led to a law authorizing the establishment of a National Memorial Commission, the October 1929 stock market crash was a death knell for this initiative. It was not until the 1980s that the initiative for a National African American Museum on the National Mall gained traction, this time within the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. Dodson traces this history and details his experience as a member of two planning that guided the National Museum of African American History and Culture to its establishment.

Subject

• Bunch, Lonnie G
• Brown, Claudine K
• National Museum of African American History and Culture

Category

Smithsonian History Bibliography

Notes

General Notes

Contained within

Callaloo Vol. 38 No. 4 (Journal)

Contact information

Institutional History Division, Smithsonian Institution Archives, 600 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C. 20024-2520, SIHistory@si.edu

Date

• 2015
• Civil War, 1861-1865

Topic

• New Museums
• Museums
• History

Place

• United States
• Washington (D.C.)

Physical description

Number of pages : 12; Page numbers : 729-741

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