All Articles Tagged "african american museums"
First Black Music Museum Planned for Nashville: Learn About 9 Other Museums Celebrating Our Legacy
A new museum is in the works that will celebrate the contributions blacks have made to popular music: The National Museum of African American Music, which will be in Nashville, Tennessee. A city that is well-known for its rich musical history, this new museum will fulfill a desire for greater diversity in the locale’s offerings that has been expressed by many tourists. Board chairman for the project Henry Hicks told ABC News: “With the focus on music and the more than 40 genres of music that African Americans contributed to in a meaningful way, it really becomes a museum of American music and allows us to tell the story of American music.” This will be the first museum to focus specifically on the music history of African-Americans — but it is not the only one that preserves the legacy of our greats. Here are more important repositories of our rich past that offer (or will when completed) a wonderful window on black achievement. Keep these destinations in mind for future educational adventures.
The National Museum of African American Music
Nashville, TN
Estimated Date of Opening: 2013
The National Museum of African American Music will be the first museum of its kind dedicated to the historical contributions of blacks in the United States to popular music. At a cost of $47.5 million, the museum intends to bring together the many artists, companies, styles and cultural movements that have both influenced and been influenced by black music.
Grand Reopening for African American Civil War Museum
(Washington Post) – Back in 1962, Frank Smith Jr. left Morehouse College in Atlanta and went to Mississippi as a civil rights activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In Holly Springs, he met a man who turned out to be the descendant of an African American Civil War veteran. “I found it ironic that a guy whose grandfather had fought to end slavery and preserve the Union was still being treated like a second-class citizen, not even allowed to vote,” Smith told me recently. “So I started reading about the soldiers.” A seed was planted that would become the African American Civil War Museum and Memorial, which Smith founded in Washington in 1998. On Monday, nearly 50 years after that chance encounter in Mississippi, he’ll preside over the dedication of the museum’s expansion into a renovated school building at 1925 Vermont Ave. NW. It is the largest museum of its kind in the country and the only national memorial to black soldiers who fought in the Civil War.
Proposed Emmett Till Museum Lost in Burr Oak Scandal
(Chicago Sun Times) — While sorting through old records in the Burr Oak cemetery office, employees found a handful of old brochures asking for donations to the “Emmett Till Historical Museum and Mausoleum.” Former manager Carolyn Towns, sentenced Friday to 12 years in prison for dismembering a corpse and theft, wanted to build a museum on the grounds where Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, are buried. That’s what she promised Mrs. Mobley. “We have so much history here, and we want to highlight all the prominent African Americans buried at the cemetery,” Towns said in 2004. But Towns’ arrest two years ago halted any plans she made to build a museum for Till and his mother in the historic black cemetery near Alsip. It wasn’t clear during the Cook County sheriff’s investigation at the cemetery how much money Towns ever collected for any Emmett Till memorial.
