Charleston’s new International African American Museum (IAAM) is set to open on January 21, 2023. Smithsonian Magazine has a great feature on the new museum. Charleston plays a central, and sometimes painful, role in Black history. According to the article:
Throughout Colonial American history…African Americans played a pivotal role in creating wealth for land owners, with Charleston owing much of its foundational success to those who were once enslaved there. Over time, these African Americans were able to push toward a position of power, demanding universal freedoms and the rights of citizenship throughout the course of various movements, from the American Revolution to the Civil War, and from the Emancipation to its immediate aftermath in the Reconstruction Era.
The formerly enslaved continued to work together in the face of Jim Crow segregation, and they remained united throughout the modern Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. But it wasn’t until 2018 that Charleston ultimately passed a resolution denouncing slavery, and acknowledging that the city had profited from the labor of enslaved Africans. And this was no small number. In truth, according to Harvard professor and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., more than 48 percent of all enslaved Africans once entered the country by way of Charleston.
“48.1% of all the African slaves who came to the United States entered this country through Charleston,” explains Gates. “So, for blackness, black culture, the African experience, the African American experience, slavery—however you want to slice it—this is ground zero. I think it’s very important that a great city in the South be the home of a great museum celebrating the achievements, the history, and the culture of persons of African descent.”
The new center will have 150,000 square feet of space for exhibitions, research, and meetings. The museum is located at on the harbor at Gadsden’s Wharf where thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in South Carolina to be sold as slaves. Looking out on the harbor, visitors can see Fort Sumter where the Confederates launched the attack on the United States that ended in the dissolution of slavery.
Here is a news report on the construction, now complete, on the site:
