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 last Friday in an Executive Order I thought it might be good to look at this museum now, before it can be changed for the worse. I am only going to highlight the museum’s treatment of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. 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. And, of course, the story of African American culture is well treated.
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 to four 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. However, 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 come very old former slaves who were interviewed by WPA workers during the Depression. They were asked about the Civil War and post-war freedom and challenges.
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 Carver 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. Below is her handkerchief.
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 that building in the Finger Lakes.
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 by the war. 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 Confederate Vice-President 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 objects 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 forced 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 built churches and schools.
This stained glass piece commemorates the growth of a church in the Black community in Washington, D.C. The chairs and pulpit come from Union Bethel AME Church in Washington. The church was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
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.
In Montgomery County Maryland freed slaves established a town called Jonesville. There were a total of eight towns set up by African Americans during the Reconstruction period in Montgomery County. Below is one of the first houses, Jones Hall Sims House, that was erected in Jonesville.
The last exhibit I want to include is The Purpose of Stereotypes. These racist depictions grew ever more prominent in American society after the Civil War.
White children received from their parents toys that depicted African Americans as less than human. Stereotypes were also used to market goods for sale. Even into the 21st Century stereotyped depictions of African Americans from Aunt Jemima to Uncle Ben were used to sell a variety of products.
Some of the depictions showed Blacks as slaves with a sentimentality that derived from the Lost Cause thinking of many white people. Others were demeaningly humorous showing Black people as alien to the white race.
While some stereotypes could appeal to the dominant white community, there were also stereotypes that repelled them. Blacks were commonly associated with crime and, particularly with the rape of white women. The white community reaction to the stereotypes was to lynch Black men.
Ida B. Wells from Memphis started a campaign to expose the wide-spread lynching of Blacks accused of crimes, both in the South and nationwide.
There is also a brief exhibit on one of America’s premier terrorist organizations, the Ku Klux Klan. Originally set up by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1865 or 1866, the Klan grew throughout the 1860s until it became a major power in every old Confederate state. It would later be revived in the early 20th Century and spread throughout the rest of the country.
Stereotypes were also spread through literature like “The Negro A Beast.” Written by Professor Charles Carroll and published by the American Book and Bible House, this was a popular book at the beginning of the 20th Century.
Historian Kevin Levin recently wrote about President Trump’s interaction with the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Trump visited the museum during his first term. The founding director of the museum took the president on a tour. Here is Bunch’s recollection of the visit:
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.
After Trump was inaugurated in 2025, Bunch came under pressure. The president’s Executive Order criticized the museum. On April 3, the New York Times said in its story on Bunch and Trump:
Asked directly on Tuesday whether Mr. Trump supported the institution’s leadership, specifically Mr. Bunch, the White House in a statement said, “President Trump is ensuring that we are celebrating true American history and ingenuity instead of corrupting it in the name of left-wing ideology.”
But later on Tuesday, asked to comment on how a book by Mr. Bunch depicted his 2017 tour with Mr. Trump of the African American history museum, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, responded: “Lonnie Bunch is a Democrat donor and rabid partisan who manufactured lies out of thin air in order to boost sales of his miserable book. Fortunately, he, along with his garbage book, are complete failures.”
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All color photos were taken by Pat Young.
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