Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8206,size=350,right]Born around 1815, James Thomas Gant was one of twelve children born to free parents on a plantation a few miles northeast of the Washington DC-line.1 As a free black man who lived through nearly the entire nineteenth century, he would see the Civil War, the destruction of slavery, the rise and fall of an all-too-brief period of
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8804,size=350,right]Louise Daniel Hutchinson set out on the path of her life’s work from a young age, growing up among DC’s African American intellectual elite in a family that imbued her with a passion for justice and a love of community. Those connections and commitments accompanied her throughout a long and influential career at the Smithsonian.