Black-History Museums: Breaking Barriers

Nearly $1-billion in new projects is putting the spotlight on the role of African-Americans in the United States

The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture resides in Baltimore’s bustling Inner

Harbor area. The museum’s 82,000-square-foot, five-story building — a study in black granite, looming windows, and bright-red accent panels — has won design awards and looms over a busy downtown street corner. A large banner bears the faces of some of the notable black historical and cultural figures from Maryland whose tales will be told inside: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Billie Holiday, and others.

A grand opening is planned for June. The museum is named for a black businessman who died in 1993 and whose foundation donated $5-million to the cause. The State of Maryland picked up the rest of the $34-million construction cost. When it opens, it will be one of the largest

museums of black history east of the Mississippi — and the latest installment in a burgeoning field of black-themed cultural institutions.

Last summer the $110-million National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened on the Cincinnati waterfront, telling the story of the clandestine abolitionist network that helped slaves escape bondage. Other sizable black museums are in the works, including a $200-million United States National Slavery Museum that L. Douglas Wilder, a former governor of Virginia and now mayor of Richmond, is striving to bring to Fredericksburg, Va., by 2007. And a year ago, President Bush signed legislation authorizing the federal government to provide half of the estimated $300-million to $400-million required to create the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will become part of the Smithsonian Institution at a location on or near the Washington Mall.

In addition to these large projects, cities from Nashville to Harrisburg, Pa., to Seattle are working to develop African-American museums of their own, and many existing black museums are planning expansions. Baltimore’s National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, which opened in 1983, last year was the beneficiary of federal legislation that authorized the museum to bill itself as the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum and Justice Learning Center and provides the museum with $5-million toward its planned $50-million expansion.

All told, nearly a billion dollars’ worth of such projects are newly completed, under construction, or being planned.

Financial Struggles

For Sandy Bellamy, executive director of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, this growing interest in the black experience is “long overdue.”

“The more institutions to keep our artifacts from disappearing and the more ways to tell our stories, the better,” she says. “There shouldn’t be a quota on the number of African-American museums.”

However, against this backdrop of hopeful growth, a pair of the country’s oldest African-American museums is struggling. The 28-year-old African American Museum in Philadelphia furloughed its entire staff last summer in the wake of financial shortfalls. Detroit’s 40-year-old Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, which moved into a new 120,000-square-foot building in 1997, saw its paid admissions drop 80 percent from 1997 to 2003 and is now digging out from nearly a million dollars in debt.

The challenge facing the existing institutions and potential new ones is how to highlight the often overlooked historical and cultural contributions of black Americans without stepping on one another’s toes when seeking money, visitors, and artifacts.

Says Charles Blockson, curator of Temple University’s Charles Blockson Afro-American Collection: “The African-American-museum world is going through a period of agony and ecstasy. The ecstasy is that several new museums are being planned, and it’s great that there is increased interest in the field. The agony is, where are we going to get the money?”

Fath Davis Ruffins, curator of African- American history and culture at the Smithsonian, a veteran museum consultant, and author of a forthcoming book about African-American museums, says the growth of black museums has been in the works for quite a while.

“It is really the fruition of activity that’s been going on for a long time,” she says, noting that the National Museum of African American History and Culture “in something like its current form” was first proposed in the 1980s. (In a similar vein, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum grew out of a feasibility study started a decade ago.) The development of such museums “might be newly visible to the public and to grant makers,” Ms. Ruffins allows.

Help From Government

Some 225 black-themed institutions belong to the Association of African American Museums, and William Gwaltney, the association’s immediate past president, estimates that as many as 400 such museums are operating nationwide.

“We have seen an increase in actual construction of museums and a substantial increase in the interest in new museums,” Mr. Gwaltney says, attributing the growth to both new scholarly research and a blooming public interest in African-American history that can be traced as far back as Alex Haley’s popular 1970s book and television series, Roots.

Almost all the proposed museums rely in part on government funds for development and operation.

But at a time when government coffers are tightening for museums across the board, some museum experts say such support may be increasingly hard to count on. An American Association of Museums survey reports that museums derived just 25.4 percent of their operating income from government agencies in 2002, down from 39.2 percent in 1989. Private donations have largely had to make up the difference.

Additionally, the number of museums is steadily increasing. According to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by The Chronicle and the Urban Institute, the number of new charities classified by the IRS as museums grew from 3,820 in 1999 to 5,602 in 2003.

“The funding challenges are real,” Mr. Gwaltney says. “But I think the way to respond to them is to stake out new territory that has not been covered well and to not tell the same stories all across the country. As Booker T. Washington said, ‘Throw down the bucket where you are,’ and tell the stories pursuant to your city or region, and do it in ways that are so attractive that you create energy.”

‘A Living, Breathing Museum’

T.B. Boyd III, a Nashville businessman, is ready to do just that. He is chairman of the board of the African-American History Foundation, which is striving to bring a $17-million black museum to Nashville. The organization has just secured 3.6 acres of state-donated land for the museum, and fund raising is under way in the hopes that construction can begin sometime in the next five years.

“We’re going to be national in scope, but with an emphasis on local history,” Mr. Boyd says. “Our museum will emphasize history, as well as music, art, and culture. We want a living, breathing museum, not just some place you come to look at stuff behind glass.”

Rather than focus on a local or regional history niche, Virginia’s National Slavery Museum hopes its singular focus sets it apart. While African-American bondage is a dark chapter in American history, Moira Kavanagh Crosby, the museum’s capital-campaign manager, says it is a subject that “resonates” with the public. “The mission of the museum is to tell the complete story of slavery, including the many untold stories, and it’s something that we’re finding excites and intrigues people,” Ms. Crosby says.

Although the museum has raised only about 10 percent of its roughly $200-million goal, its officials plan to break ground this year on a building designed by Chien Chung Pei, son of the noted architect I.M. Pei. Bill Cosby, the comedian, serves on the museum’s board and is performing a series of benefit shows for the museum that officials say could raise as much as $1-million.

“I don’t feel that, as a museum addressing issues related to African-American history, we are facing a disproportionate amount of funding competition,” Ms. Crosby says. “No prospect has said to us that they won’t support our museum because they have already committed to another African-American museum.”

Income Ideas

Many other African-American museums also are taking aggressive and creative approaches to fund raising, in part out of recognition that government funds may not always be available.

Bernard Chavis, interim president of the African American Museum in Philadelphia, says his organization has learned the hard way about the need for diverse sources of income. Last May the museum had to lay off its entire staff. Most of these employees stayed on as volunteers until the city government ultimately advanced the museum $135,000 of the $300,000 it annually contributes to its operation.

“I’m not blaming folks, but nonprofit museums need to change their mind-set,” says Mr. Chavis, who ran his own insurance company for 30 years and who plans to bring a “business approach” to the museum.

His plans include aggressively marketing the facility — which is in a historic district a block away from the Liberty Bell, the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and other downtown attractions — as a site for weddings, social gatherings, and corporate functions. And when sizable events are booked for the space, Mr. Chavis intends to be sure the gift shop remains open.

The institution also is working to promote museum memberships to the city’s black churches and social groups.

Some of the newer African-American museums are taking an even more aggressive approach to securing additional revenue. A jazz club might be incorporated into the African-American museum being planned for Harrisburg, Pa. The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle plans to renovate a historic African-American school building to include both a 22,000-square-foot museum and rental apartments.

Ms. Ruffins, the Smithsonian curator, says museums that have strong, diverse boards are likely to do better than others. She says some of the first generation of black museums had “unwieldy board structures” made up largely of political figures and social activists, whose power and influence can wane.

She adds: “The boards must include people who are interested in the topic, but who also have the financial wherewithal to personally support the museums, and to bring in the support of their friends.”

Officials at the two black museums in Baltimore — the National Great Blacks in Wax and the Reginald F. Lewis Museums — will face the added challenge of competing for board members and donors in the same city.

But Joanne Martin, the wax museum’s president, says she is not particularly concerned because the two organizations are in very different locations and serve different missions. Ms. Martin developed the museum out of four wax figures she and her late husband once set up in shopping malls and church basements. It currently features more than 100 wax figures of both prominent and little-known African-American historical figures, and it occupies a former firehouse located in an impoverished East Baltimore neighborhood.

“The Walters Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art coexist, and no one says that if you have one you don’t need the other,” Ms. Martin says, referring to Baltimore’s two largest art museums. “And so the Great Blacks and Lewis museums will coexist, and so will the Smithsonian’s African-American museum and the slavery museum and all the museums that are finally telling a story that for so long has been neglected.”