Black Museums: Keeping the Legacy Alive

From Ebony

SUMMARY: Black museums in the United States have chronicled the tragedies and triumphs of African-American life from ancient civilizations to the present day. The article surveys several notable Black museums, and discusses their philosophies and plans for the future.

From ancient African civilizations through the first landing of Blacks on American shores, to contemporary life in Black America, Black museums have chronicled the tragedies and triumphs of African Americans. As repositories of African-American history, culture and art, Black museums offer a window on the African Diaspora and Blacks' subsequent struggle for freedom.

In recent years, there has been a flurry of activity in the museum field, including proposals for repositories or memorials in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Jamestown, Virginia, to honor the contributions of Black Americans. While he was governor of Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder convened a panel, including historian John Hope Franklin and philanthropist and actor Bill Cosby, for preliminary work on a national museum honoring the African-American slaves. The museum will be located at the Jamestown site where the first Africans in colonial America landed in 1619.

Through the arts, history, academia and music, the Jamestown Slave Museum will stand as a symbol of perseverance in overcoming adversity, cruelty and man's inhumanity to man. The museum will be an important piece of American history that has been left unaddressed. Plans for the museum were initiated in August 1993 and Wilder has indicated that bringing it to fruition will be one of his major initiatives.

In New York City, an effort is under way to preserve an African burial ground dating back to 1710. The remains were unearthed at the proposed site of a federal (U.S. Government) office building and courthouse in lower Manhattan. Representative Charles B. Rangel (Democrat, New York), Senator Alphonse M. D'Amato (Republican, New York), and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Democrat, New York) have introduced legislation in both houses of Congress requesting funds to redesign the federal building and establish a memorial marking the grave site.

Perhaps the boldest move to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to learn about African-American history is the effort by legislators and Black cultural figures to establish a National African-American Museum in Washington, D.C. The proposed museum, to be part of the Smithsonian Institution, will be a national repository for African-American objects and documents, a research and training facility for museum professionals and an authoritative resource on African-American history.

Legislation to establish the museum was introduced into both houses of Congress in 1991 by Representative John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) and Senator Paul Simon (Democrat, Illinois). The bill passed in the House in June 1993 and is awaiting action by the Senate. If the necessary authorizing legislation is enacted and funding becomes available, the museum could open between 1996 and 2000.

Black history is also thriving at Black museums across the United States. Chicago's DuSable Museum of African-American History recently added a wing named for the late Harold Washington, Chicago's first Black mayor. At the National Afro- American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio, visitors can view four decades of Black American life in one exhibit.

In New York City, The Studio Museum in Harlem is typical of many Black museums that offer visitors a global view of Black art from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. At the Afro- American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an exhibit explores how the Great Migration (1910- 40) permanently changed the dynamics of modern-day Philadelphia.

Thanks to more than 100 Black museums around the United States, the legacy is being kept alive for generations to come. Local Black museum directors are working diligently to ensure the proper interpretation and preservation of African-American history. "Our mission is to collect, preserve, exhibit, document and interpret art and artifacts of the African and Black-American Diaspora," explains Kinshasha Conwill, executive director of The Studio Museum in Harlem. "We are dedicated to preserving and conserving the material evidence of the African-American and African presence in the New World."

Black museums are also committed to maintaining the integrity of Black art, Conwill says. "A real stereotype of Black people is that we're these anything-goes kind of folks who will call anything art," she says. "Actually, we are a very serious people when it comes to culture. It has to do with valuing what is precious to us, whether it's art, music or literature."

The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce hopes to underscore the value of Black-American culture and history with its exhibit, "From Victory to Freedom," which chronicles Black-American life from the 1940s through the 1970s, a tumultuous period in Black history. "We find that the most important part of our history occurred during the 1950s," says Dr. John Fleming, the museum's director. "It was the last decade in which the Black community was intact. Our institutions, like the Black church, family and schools, were dominated by Black people who lived and worked in the community."

In a similar vein, the exhibit, "Let This Be Your Home," at Philadelphia's Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, focuses on Southern Blacks' adaptation to Northern life during the Great Migration (1910-1940), the largest internal migration in American history. "We present the local story of the migration experience in Philadelphia," explains Dr. Rowena Stewart, the museum's executive director. "We show where people came from, what struggles they faced and what their contributions were. We discovered that Blacks were not taking away from the people who already lived there, which is a common misconception, but rather they were sharing and building on what was already here."

While Black museums are doing much to preserve the African- American legacy, Black museum directors constantly labor under the threat of cuts in arts funding. When there has been an economic downturn, the directors say, federal and state governments attempt to balance their budgets on the backs of cultural institutions. More often than not, Black museums, with a greater dependence on public money, are hit the hardest. "We have learned to operate on shoestring [minimal] budgets," says the Studio Museum's Conwill.

Even in financially hard times, some museums are devising creative financing plans to help fund expansion. With the help of private donations and public bond money, Chicago's DuSable Museum of African-American History built its $4-million wing. Dr. Gwendolyn Robinson, the museum's executive director, said the new wing will double the museum's permanent exhibition space.

Private funding is a matter of life and death for Black museums. Community support is critical if these institutions are to survive. "It's really the responsibility of the Black community to support its museums," Wilberforce's Fleming says. "All we can do is build buildings. It takes people to bring museums to life." Blacks can support their local museum, he says, by becoming members or joining policy-making committees.

Stewart says Blacks can also show their support by donating family keepsakes to the permanent collections of Black museums. "As long as the object stays within the family it is protected, but it doesn't become public history," she says. "What we need are objects that tell the story of the journey."

Handicrafts, Bibles, photographs, clothes, invitations, church bulletins, campaign material and sports memorabilia are all historical artifacts, Stewart explains. "Years ago, people used to say there's no history; there's no record," she recalls. "What we know now is that every home and every family is a private repository of information. Our goal, ideally, is to have those people bring those artifacts to museums so that we can tell the story."

To tell that story, Black museum directors are at the forefront of creating a museum that is "hands-on" and community- based.

"People have an image of museums as silent places where you go to look at things hanging on a wall," DuSable director Robinson says. "But actually they are places of living history."

This article has been cleared for republication and abridgment in English and in translation by USIS and the press outside the United States; it may also be carried over the Internet. Credit to the source and the following note must appear on the title page of any reprint:

Reprinted by permission from Ebony magazine. Copyright (c) 1994 by Johnson Publishing, Inc.