James Oliver Horton, 1943–2017

The American national memory is fundamentally shaped by African American history and culture. However, the essence of this experience is often forgotten or downplayed and the story of how race, and African American culture has shaped and continues to reshape American life, is less understood than it should be. The best museum presentations can help people find that meaningful and useable past. While there have been great changes in whom and what museums interpret about the African American experience, the rhetoric of change fails to match the realities of every day life in museums. To have a real and lasting impact on the American public, museums must overcome or at least grapple with a few core challenges, including: 1. Transcending the rosy glow of the past, 2. Resisting monolithic depictions of the past, 3. Ambiguity, and 4. Finding a "new integration" that re-centers African American history. Success in these areas would allow the clashes, conflicts, compromises, and cultural borrowing that is at the core of the American past to be truly sustained in the center of historical thought and collective memory.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture Act authorized the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to establish grant programs for museums of African American history and culture. Through its Museum Grants for African American History and Culture program, IMLS helps these museums improve operations, enhance stewardship of collections, engage in professional development, and attract new professionals to the field. The Act has fostered a national ecosystem that leverages the collective resources of the National Museum and African American museums throughout the United States to preserve and share the strength and breadth of the African American experience.

This article explores in four sections the logic and impact of the ways in which all archival collections, but African American collections most poignantly, are incomplete; and how a national search engine for African American history confronts and attempts to address the absence of African American stories, voices, documents, and histories. Following the work of scholars such as Verne Harris, Michelle Caswell, and others, the first section analyzes how and why archives are always necessarily incomplete, as well as the particular reasons behind the bias and erasure of and within African American history and the archives that have come to collect and represent it. The second section discusses how Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) was conceived as a response to the need for a more complete archival record of African American history and culture. Section three presents Umbra Search as a case study—what it is, how it has grown, the role of partners, and the challenges it faces. The final section considers the roles of academic and community collections, technology, and collaboration in creating access to a deeper and more fulsome representation of American history and culture.

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

Manifest Wendel A. White (bio) Manifest is an ongoing project, a portfolio of nearly one hundred photographs of African American material culture held in public and private collections throughout the United States. These repositories have accumulated diaries, receipts for the purchase of humans, hair, a drum, a door, photographs, figurines, and other artifacts—some with great historical significance, some the commonplace, quotidian material of black life. This project is concerned with the physical remnants of the American concept and representation of race. The histories of slavery, abolition, the U.S. Civil War, segregation, oppression, accomplishment, and agency are among the narratives that emerge in these photographs. I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains. The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration. While the artifacts are remarkable as visual evidence of lives and events, I also intend the viewer to consider this informal reliquary as a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history and memory. Various projects have occupied my attention during the past two decades; in retrospect, each has been part of a singular effort to seek out the ghosts and resonant memories of the material world. I am drawn to the stories "dwelling within" a spoon, a cowbell, a book, a postcard, or a partially burned document. The photographs are made with a 4 × 5 view camera, using film or digital capture. The prints are pigment-based inkjet. [End Page 14] Click for larger view View full resolution Lunch Box, Larkin Franklin Sr., Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 15] Click for larger view View full resolution Slave Bill of Sale, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, 2009. [End Page 16] Click for larger view View full resolution Door Knob, Maye St. Julien, Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 17] Click for larger view View full resolution Spoon, Harriet Tubman House, Auburn, New York, 2009. [End Page 18] Click for larger view View full resolution Iron, Great Plain Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 19] Click for larger view View full resolution Tintype, Fenton History Center, Jamestown, New York, 2009. [End Page 20] Click for larger view View full resolution Zora Neale Hurston Sketch Book, Smathers Library Special Collections, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 21] Click for larger view View full resolution James Baldwin Inkwell, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution FBI Files on Malcolm X, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution Poster of Angela Davis, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution Drum, Dan Desdunes Band, Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Cab Calloway Home Movies: Haiti, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Radio Raheem's boombox from the movie Do the Right Thing, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution New Orleans Door, Hurricane Katrina, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Quilt (W. Black), Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 29] Wendel A. White Wendel A. White was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has received various awards, including fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in...

Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and Canada. Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more public. This book tells 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 in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had 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. Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programmes. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015.

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

The main object of my paper is to co-relate the decoded signified idea of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mestiza Consciousness of Gloria Andalzua with the referential detail from the text Beloved by Toni Morrison. The co-relating factor of both these theories is based on cause and effect issues. The decoded signified ideas of African-American history, myth, folklore, cultural values and moral codes have impacted a lot to shape an inclusive conscious idea which is close enough to the concept of “Third World Consciousness”. European history and theories alone are inadequate to express the true sense of African American culture, literature and its moral values. Toni Morrison’s basic concern “is to move beyond the systematic or structural patterns” of those theories and history ( Rigney 7). The African American ethnic community has always suffered from an identity crisis caused by the past slave tradition, racism, sexism, dehumanized moral and cultural values. In Beloved, Morrison depicted an indigenous social, cultural, moral and literal value of life which aims for developing a higher consciousness, a kind of wisdom. Morrison attempted to break the boundary of subject-object duality that caged her for a long term. Through the text Beloved, Toni Morrison made a universal appeal to restore and re-establish the indigenousness of the African American community. But the sense of restoring and revaluing one’s indigenousness will remain an incomplete guidance unless one comes across with higher consciousness. In developing a sense of higher consciousness or a “new consciousness” the role of “Mestiza Consciousness” theory of Gloria Andalzua is an interdependent important factor. The most important legacy of an ethnic community is language. Basically racism or color line problems are the root cause behind the traumatic crisis of African American people. Undoubtedly, “there is no racism without language” (Pramod K. Nayar, 224) Morrison assumed the vibrancy of language which is a definite obstruction in reshaping a kind of higher consciousness among the African-American ethnic community. The decoded signified ideas of African American history, culture, myth and folklore develop a higher consciousness of protest literature and culture to reestablish indigenousness in an inclusive environment of lively experiences.

Freedom Comes in a BoxReflections on the National Museum of African American History and Culture Radiclani Clytus (bio) Blacks in one boxBlacks in two boxBlacks onBlacks stacked in boxes stacked on boxesBlacks in boxes stacked on shoresBlacks in boxes stacked on boats in darknessBlacks in boxes do not floatBlacks in boxes count their losses —Terrance Hayes, “The Blue Seuss” In August 2016 the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which is located on the last available site of Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 master plan for the US Capital, will open its doors in honor of the black experience in America. Since the museum’s initial proposal in 1915 by black Union Army veterans, African Americans have been relentless in their demands for a parcel of what is often described as our nation’s most symbolic, if not most important, tract of real estate. As early as 1929, the collective efforts of black soldiers and citizens were sufficient enough to compel President Herbert Hoover to establish a commission that was charged with developing a plan for a National Memorial Building where “the Negro’s contribution to the achievements of America” could be duly recognized (Wilkins). This committee included the likes of Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Revere Williams, and John R. Hawkins; but hard luck in the form of the Great Depression obstructed their mission to secure comprehensive legislation and private fundraising. As a result, the appeal for a national black history museum subsided for several decades, only to reemerge during the latter half of the twentieth century. So it’s not surprising that when the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s enlivened discussions about how Americans should view the legacy of slavery, skirmishes over the proposed museum and reparations became the routine fodder of talk shows and nightly news programs. One might even argue that there is a correlation between how such debates persisted within the black public sphere (aka barber and beauty shops) and the tenacity with which Representatives such as the late Mickey Leland and John Lewis held forth as the museum’s sole congressional advocates. But [End Page 742] for all of Leland’s and Lewis’s legislative achievements, beginning with the appointment of Mary Schmidt Campbell as the chair of the Smithsonian advisory board in 1990, the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act (H.R. 3491) would not be ratified until December 16, 2003. Owing to the act’s countless compromises and delays, its realization has now come to feel like so many of our nation’s democratic struggles that turn out to be profoundly reasonable despite embattling a lifetime’s worth of opposition. Fortunately, this century’s long effort is complemented by an architectural structure that reflects the temerity of the museum’s supporters and their bold programmatic intentions. The museum’s design, which is the result of the collaboration between three internationally acclaimed architects, Philip Freelon, David Adjaye, and the late J. Max Bond, Jr. (all of whom are of African descent), marks a radical break from the neoclassical white marble monuments that dot the architectural landscape of the Capital’s centerpiece. The building itself has the appearance of an upside down ziggurat and consists of three bronze decoratively patterned inverted trapezoids that rest atop a massive plinth. According to Adjaye, a Ghanaian-British national with whom the museum’s design is closely associated, the inverted trapezoids directly reference those Yoruban shrines that were contemporaneous with the existence of the Transatlantic slave trade and thus honor the history of African craftsmanship through the visual effect of a shimmering bronze corona. By having the building’s silhouette reflect upon the foundry cultures of Nigeria and Benin, Adjaye hopes to call attention to the unacknowledged black artisans who developed much of the ornamental metal work that can be found in cities such as Savannah, GA; Charleston, SC; and New Orleans, LA. Arguably, there is very little in Adjaye’s structure and the surrounding landscape that brings to mind the agricultural labor that was essential to the accumulation of white wealth within the Americas. However, a case for this...

A Place of Our OwnThe National Museum of African American History and Culture Howard Dodson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Gallery Space. Rendering by Adjaye Associates (2011). [End Page 729] The most significant African American artistic statement that will be made in Washington, DC, over the next decade will not be a painting, a sculpture, a dance, a theatrical production, or a monument. It will be the official opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) scheduled to take place in 2016—before the end of Barack Obama’s second term as President of the United States. The NMAAHC will likely be one of the last, if not the last, museum constructed on the National Mall. This first Smithsonian Institution museum on the National Mall dedicated to documenting and interpreting the centrality of the African American experience in the making of America and Americans promises to substantially change the national conversation about America, its history, and its cultural identity. As much a venture into revealing the depth, breadth, and complexity of African American’s cultural and artistic imprint on America as it is into interrogating the relationship of Black people to the economic, political, social, and cultural development of these yet-to-be United States, the National Museum of African American History and Culture will shed new light on both what America has been and what it still has the potential to become. It has been a long time in the making. Almost a hundred years ago, black Civil War veterans and their supporters started black Americans’ quest to establish such an institution to commemorate African Americans’ role in the making of America. These veterans of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) were simply seeking to have the nation acknowledge, recognize, and honor them for the part they had played in the Union victory. Fifty years earlier, they had not been so honored. They were not even invited to march in the Grand Review Parade for the victorious Union armies which took place in Washington, DC, in May of 1865. Veterans of three white Union armies marched down Pennsylvania Ave. to the applause and cheers of President Andrew Johnson and thousands of grateful citizens. But there was, apparently, no place for the regiments of the USCT in the victory parade. No place, no honor for the more than 180,000 African Americans who had served in the Union army. USCT veterans—and African American citizens—were committed to participating fully in the 50th Anniversary of the Grand Review slated to take place in Washington, DC, in May of 1915. To support this effort, they formed a Committee of Colored Citizens of the Grand Army of the Republic. The official organizing committee for the anniversary parade had made no [End Page 730] provisions for black participation. The Committee of Colored Citizens provided such support, raising money to cover housing, food, and logistical costs for USCT Veterans. Significantly, after the parade, they used leftover funds to form the National Memorial Association to create a more permanent memorial to African Americans’ military contributions. Within a year, this germinal idea had evolved into a proposal to create a memorial building to house a comprehensive National African American Museum. The fully articulated vision of the proposed museum included the following: It is the purpose of the National Memorial Association to erect a beautiful building suitable to depict the Negro’s [sic] contribution to America in the military service, in art, literature, invention, science, industry, etc.—a fitting tribute to the negro’s contributions and achievements, and which would serve as an educational center giving inspiration and pride to the present and future generations that they be inspired to follow the example of those who have aided in the advancement of the race and Nation. (qtd. in Wilkins 8)1 Though no specific site was identified for the construction of this memorial building, the unarticulated expectation was that it would be built on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This was because by 1915, the Mall had become generally recognized as the place that most exemplified the nation’s sense of honor and dignity. As home to the...

African American Satisfaction With the SNAP-Ed Program: A Qualitative Exploration

African American Perceptions of Service Provided by Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education: A Qualitative Exploration

ABSTRACTOne challenge many museums cite is unintentional exclusion. There is too much power and respect that museums hold to be exclusive – intentionally or unintentionally. From the outset, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has been a place for everyone. Inclusion is built in its mission and vision. This article discusses how this became central to the museum, challenges that were faced in accomplishing this, and how it is put into practice through education.

Felrath Hines (b. Samuel Felrath Hines 1913, d. 1993) was an African American artist and paintings conservator based in New York and Washington, DC. After observing deterioration on an untitled 1978 painting by Hines in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), archival research, instrumental analysis, and a survey of other works by the artist were carried out to characterize Hines's materials and determine underlying causes for the cracking and delamination observed. The NMAAHC paintings were correlated with Hines's detailed studio notes by their dates, dimensions, and palettes. Instrumental analysis provided evidence of Hines's method of reworking compositions by characterizing the paint and ground layers. Several potential causes of deterioration are explored, including the artist's use of zinc white, the repainting of compositions after long periods of time, and solvent evaporation from the alkyd grounds. Despite Hines's meticulous technique and knowledge of artists materials, the inherent vice of modern materials contributed to the condition of two paintings.

Created and maintained by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/The recent opening of the Smithsonian's newest museum, the National Museum of African Am...