I was going to roll-out this article in May, but because of the president’s unparalleled attack on the National Museum African American History and Culture on Friday in an Executive Order I thought it might be good to look at this museum now, before it can be changed. I am only going to highlight the museum’s treatment of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Just so you know, the museum does an extensive treatment of slavery before the war and it provides a very good recap of what went on after Reconstruction. It has exhibits on Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the effort in the courts to have the government give full effect to the rights obtained under the 14th and 15th Amendments.
The African American Museum is located on the Washington Mall at 1400 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20560. Many of the landmarks on the mall are built according to Neo-Classical designs, but this museum sticks out. The museum was established in 2003 at a ceremony presided over by President George W. Bush. It was opened in 2016 by President Barack Obama. The architectural firm that was awarded the project Freelon Group/Adjaye Associates/Davis Brody Bond created a modern building that combined an inverted pyramid and a Yuruba crown, images closely associated with Africa.
As soon as the museum opened it was flooded with visitors, and high visitation numbers have continued to the present day. In 2024, a total of 1.6 million people visited it. Unlike other Smithsonian sites, you need an entry ticket to get into the museum. The tickets are free. Here is what the Smithsonian says about the tickets: “Visitors can reserve timed-entry passes online. All visitors, regardless of age, must have a timed-entry pass to enter the museum. The museum cannot always accommodate walk-up visitors.” When the museum first opened, you needed to reserve your ticket months in advance. However, today you should try to reserve two weeks in advance. Here is where you reserve a ticket.
When you are on the Mall, it is easy to recognize the building. If you have a ticket walk up to the entry. I have gone to the museum three times and there is always a line. The entry way passes you through quickly.
While the museum has been open for nearly ten years now, on the inside you may find crowds for some of the most visited exhibits which include slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Please be patient.
The museum is next to the Smithsonian’s American History Museum and across from the Washington Monument. If you are bringing kids to the museum, you may want to combine visits to all three sites on the same day. Both the American History Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture have “unique” fast-food restaurants. Not to say the food is outstanding, but for children it will hold more pleasure than stopping at a McDonald’s.
While the visitation is quite large, the entry lobby is relaxed and uncrowded.
I will only discuss the exhibits on the Civil War and Reconstruction. However, if you are short on time, you should combine those two exhibits with the large exhibit on slavery. The Slavery to Freedom gallery is on Concourse 3.
Some of the sources quoted are from very old former slaves who were interviewed by WPA workers during the Depression.
When I was a boy, there were no African American museums, or exhibits in American history museums that dealt with the lives of Black people. Most white Americans knew something about George Washington Carve and the peanut, but most knew almost nothing about slavery and even less about Reconstruction. By the late 1960s, modern historians in response to calls to document Black history from the Civil Rights Movement, began researching that history and publishing more books on the African American past than ever before. However, while the literature was accumulating I can tell you as a man who went to dozens of historic sites every year, it was not until I went to Petersburg in 1980 that I saw anything about Black participation in the Civil War. Many of the battlefields did not have any exhibits connecting the war to slavery until almost the 21st Century! The National Museum of African American History and Culture does give a good reflection on our African American past and it also points us to a future where people of color, women, LGBT+, immigrants, and working class people can have their stories told in historically accurate museums.
One of the focal point of the pre-Civil War experience is the Underground Railroad.
Relics from those days include several from Harriet Tubman who first came to public attention through her guiding escaped slave from Maryland to Canada along the Underground Railroad.
The museum also has Harriet Tubman’s hymnal. Tubman was strengthened in her work by her deep religious faith. She helped set up the AME church in Auburn, New York and she is buried within sight of the building.
Tubman was an important figure before the war, but she really got national attention through her leadership of the United States Colored Troops in the Carolina’s. After the Civil War she became an advocate for pensions for the men of the United States Colored Troops and their widows and orphans.
The museum also has a slave cabin that was used at Point of Pines plantation in Edisto Island in South Carolina. Edisto became a haven for refugees escaping slavery during the Civil War. After the war, the large number of United States troops there kept the island free of Ku Klux Klan activity and the Black population lived without the kind of violence that characterized much of the South.
As the signage reminds us, even in a slaves “home” the master rules.
Next is the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the Civil War. This gallery concentrates on the refugee situation, various efforts at emancipation, and the service of United States Colored Troops.
Sometimes when I speak on this subject listeners tell me that no Union soldiers thought that slavery would be abolished. However, as I remind them, there were 200,000 Black men in service in the Army and Navy who definitely did think slavery would end.
Recruiting posters for U.S.C.T. explicitly talked about the war’s impact on race relations. As the poster below says “BATTLES OF LIBERTY AND THE UNION…FAIL NOW & OUR RACE IS DOOMED.” Black men saw the close tie between defeating the Confederacy and Emancipation.
The museum does present the Confederacy’s side. As Alexander Stephens said in 1861 “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery…is his natural and normal condition.”
The next section is called “Self-Emancipation” showing African Americans in a refugee camp with the beginnings of the U.S.C.T.
There is good integration of Three-D object with large blow-ups of photos. Unfortunately, the interplay of the glass over the exhibits cause some problems with reflections in my photos.
As the quote from an unknown Black man says, some Northern soldiers believed they were fighting for the Union, but to the Black man “Liberty must take the day.”
As Union forces advanced during the war, African Americans self-emancipated and fled their slave labor camps, called “plantations.” Their demand for inclusion force military commanders and politicians to have to come to terms with the ending of slavery.
A lot of the visitors spent a lot of time reading the signage about what the war meant, not just to the U.S.C.T., but also to the four million enslaved African Americans.
There is a formal exhibit on the United States Colored Troops with photos and relics that have survived until this day.
General Benjamin Butler, who had started the process of the army welcoming escaped slaves and helped begin the process of incorporating Blacks into the army, also created a decoration, “The Butler Medal”, for Blacks who showed outstanding gallantry.
People like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass are quoted in the exhibit on the U.S.C.T.
There is also a focus on the story of Private Gordon, an escaped slave whose back was so scarred from whippings that his photo was published in newspapers throughout the North.
The exhibit also shows the close connection between the Union Army and the freed enslaved people. The army was the proximate cause of the freedom that Blacks chose and their help assisted the Union army with intelligence, labor, and Black soldiers.
Of course, the exhibit locks into the two most famous people of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
Harriet Tubman makes an appearance here as well for her service during the war and her care for refugees and veterans.
Freedom meant the chance for families to be reunited. While many freed people never ever saw their children or parents who had been sold off, there were some who found relatives they had not seen for more than a decade.
After the war, the African American community first build churches and schools.
Previously unknown African Americans set up newspapers, political organizations, and began to be photographed so that their descendants would be able to see the Freedom Generation.
Under slavery, many Blacks only had clothes that were handed out by the slave labor camp’s owner. After emancipation, Blacks could dress themselves.
The gallery next turns its attention to the laws that finally recognized Blacks as free. The Emancipation Proclamation is probably the most famous.
It is followed by the 13th Amendment which passed in the Congress under Lincoln but Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate cell eight months before it was ratified.
Next was the 14th Amendment which recognized People of Color as full United States Citizens and conferred citizenship on anyone born in the United States with the exception of people not subject to the jurisdiction of the government.
With the three Reconstruction Amendments already presented, the museum next present the realities of the Reconstruction Era.
Robert Smalls, an escaped slave who delivered a Confederate ship to the Union during the war, shows how far Black people could go during the decade of Reconstruction.
But there were efforts to keep Blacks from achieving. The Black Codes were passed in former-Confederate states in 1865 and 1866 to maintain control over the labor and lives of the Black people living in the South.
From Kevin Levin
You may recall that Trump visited the museum during his first term. At first he requested a private tour, with founding museum director Lonnie Bunch, on Martin Luther King Day that would require the museum to close its doors to the public. Bunch refused to do so. When the tour was scheduled for the following month, Bunch was told that the president “was in a foul mood and that he did not want to see anything ‘difficult.’”
Bunch recalls the tour in his book, A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:As we descended into via elevator into the History Galleries, I tried to find ways to engage President Trump by explaining that the slave trade was the first global business and how its impact reshaped the world in ways that still resonate today As we continued through the gallery, we approached a section that examined how nations like Portugal, England, and the Netherlands profited immensely from transporting and selling millions of Africans. The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade. As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display, he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking. (149)
