The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC, opened in 2016, is the nation's only museum dedicated solely to capturing and sharing the "unvarnished truth" of African American life and legacy. The four-level museum became the only national museum solely dedicated to the documentation of African American life, history and culture.
Through powerful exhibits and interactive elements, visitors experience stories of resilience, tragedy, creativity and influence that shaped the country, from slavery and the Civil Rights Movement to groundbreaking achievements in music, sports, politics, the arts and more. NMAAHC is the world's largest museum dedicated to African-American history and culture. In 2022 it welcomed 1,092,552 visitors, and was the second-most visited Smithsonian Museum and eighth-most visited museum in the United States. The museum has more than 40,000 objects in its collection, although only about 3,500 items are on display.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Visiting the Museum
Location and Access
NMAAHC is located at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW on the National Mall. The closest Metro stop is Federal Triangle on the Blue, Orange and Silver lines.
Tickets and Admission
Due to the museum's popularity, free timed entry passes are required for all visitors, regardless of age. A limited number of timed-entry passes are available, and visitors can reserve their passes up to 30 days in advance on a rolling basis.
Read also: Significance of the Scarab Beetle
What to See Inside
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture is a state-of-the-art building that addresses nearly every aspect of the African American experience, covering the arts, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, athletics and much more. The building's five-floor layout is designed to take visitors on a symbolic and chronological journey from slavery to modern-day, ideally experienced from the bottom up.
The museum’s collection of artifacts is astounding: 3,500 are on view, with another 35,000 or so in the collection. Navigating the entirety of the NMAAHC would be very difficult to accomplish in one visit, and the breadth of its exhibits is astonishing. However, there are several displays that you should be aware of before you go.
Key Exhibits Include:
- Musical Crossroads: This exhibit details the history African American music, from the arrival of the first Africans to today. From jazz to hip-hop, African American musicians brought forth new forms of expression that lit a candle for liberty, justice and change.
- Slavery and Freedom: This exhibit uses first-person accounts and striking historical artifacts to tell an incredibly complicated tale. The exhibit traces slavery from 15th century Africa and Europe to the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. This vital history emphasizes that American slavery and freedom are deeply intertwined, and that the story of slavery is in fact a shared one that resides at the core of American politics, economics and daily life to this day.
- Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom and A Changing America: The former covers the era of segregation and the onset of the Civil Rights Movement, highlighting the struggle that African Americans faced and conquered in establishing a cultural identity and their own communities, changing the nation along the way. The latter goes from 1968 until today, covering the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Examples of artifacts from the NMAAHC collection.
The museum’s exterior, conceived by Ghanaian-born architect David Adjaye, is artfully made up of a three-tiered, bronze-colored screen.
Read also: Exploring African American Sunday Culture
Tours and Events
Yes! Most tours are about one hour, focusing in on a particular topic or exhibit. It's best to check before your visit and arrive early, since tours depend on docent availability. Check the museum’s calendar for more programming and events.
The Contemplative Court
This special room on the ground level was designed to be the perfect environment to decompress, apt for deep thoughts, meditation and processing the history presented in the museum's exhibits. At its center, a round skylight feeds a cascading fountain, filling the dimly lit room with soft glow and the gentle sound of falling water.
The Journey to Creation
The concept of a national museum dedicated to African-American history and culture can be traced back to the second decade of the 20th century. In 1915, African-American veterans of the Union Army met at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., for a reunion and parade. Frustrated with the racial discrimination they still faced, the veterans formed a committee to build a memorial to various African-American achievements.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1915 | African-American veterans form a committee to build a memorial. |
| 1929 | President Hoover appoints a commission to build a "National Memorial Building." |
| 1981 | Congress approves a federal charter for a National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio. |
| 2003 | Congress authorizes the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. |
| 2016 | The NMAAHC opens its doors to the public. |
Their efforts paid off in 1929, when President Herbert Hoover appointed Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, and 10 others to a commission charged with building a "National Memorial Building" showcasing African-American achievements in the arts and sciences. But Congress did not back the project, and private fundraising also failed. Proposals for a museum began circulating again in Congress in the early 1970s.
In 1981, Congress approved a federal charter for a National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio. The museum, built and funded with private money, opened in 1987. In the early 1980s, Tom Mack (the African-American chairman of Tourmobile, a tourist bus company) founded the National Council of Education and Economic Development (NCEED). Mack's intention was to use the non-profit group to advance his ideas about economic development, education, and the arts in the black community. Emboldened by Congress's action in 1981, Mack began using the NCEED to press for a stand-alone African-American museum in D.C. in 1985.
Read also: The Good Egg's travels in Kenya
Mack contacted Representative Mickey Leland about his idea for a national museum focusing on African Americans, and won his support for federal legislation in 1985. Leland sponsored a non-binding resolution (H.R. 666) advocating an African-American museum on the National Mall, which passed the House of Representatives in 1986. The congressional attention motivated the Smithsonian to improve its presentation of African-American history. Rep. "Field to Factory" encouraged Mack to continue pursuing a museum.
In 1987 and 1988, NCEED began lining up support among black members of Congress for legislation that would establish an independent African-American national history museum in Washington, D.C. But NCEED ran into opposition from the African American Museum Association (AAMA), an umbrella group that represented small local African-American art, cultural, and history museums across the United States. John Kinard, president of the AAMA and co-founder of the Anacostia Community Museum (which became part of the Smithsonian in 1967), opposed NCEED's effort.
Kinard argued that a national museum would consume donor dollars and out-bid local museums for artifacts and trained staff. Kinard and the AAMA instead advocated that Congress establish a $50 million fund to create a national foundation to support local black history museums as a means of mitigating these problems.
In 1988, Rep. John Lewis and Rep. Leland introduced legislation for a stand-alone African-American history museum within the Smithsonian Institution. But the bill faced significant opposition in Congress due to its cost. Supporters of the African-American museum tried to salvage the proposal by suggesting that the Native Indian museum (then moving through Congress) and African-American museum share the same space. Rep. John Lewis, who championed the legislation for the museum after Rep. Lewis and Leland introduced another bill in 1989.
Once more, cost considerations killed the bill. The Smithsonian Institution, however, was moving toward support for a museum. In 1988, an ad hoc group of African-American scholars-most from within the Smithsonian, but some from other museums as well-began debating what an African-American history museum might look like.
While the group discussed the issue informally, Smithsonian Secretary Robert McCormick Adams, Jr. publicly suggested in October 1989 that "just a wing" of the National Museum of American History should be devoted to black culture, a pronouncement that generated extensive controversy.
The discussions by the ad hoc group prompted the Smithsonian to take a more formal approach to the idea of an African-American heritage museum. Brown's group reported six months later that the Smithsonian should form a high-level advisory board to conduct a more thorough study of the issue. The Brown study was blunt in its discussion of the divisions within the African-American community about the advisability of a stand-alone national museum of African-American culture and history, but also forceful in its advocacy of a national museum of national prominence and national visibility with a broad mandate to document the vast sweep of the African-American experience in the United States.
The Smithsonian formed a 22-member advisory board, chaired by Mary Schmidt Campbell, in May 1990. The creation of the advisory board was an important step for the Smithsonian. There were many on the Smithsonian's Board of Regents who believed that "African-American culture and history" was indefinable and that not enough artifacts and art of national significance could be found to build a museum.
On May 6, 1991, after a year of study, the advisory board issued a report in favor of a national museum, and the Smithsonian Board of Regents voted unanimously to support the idea. However, the proposal the regents adopted only called not for a stand-alone institution but a "museum" housed in the East Hall of the existing Arts and Industries Building.
The Smithsonian Board of Regents agreed in September 1991 to draft museum legislation, and submitted their bill to Congress in February 1992. The bill was criticized by Tom Mack and others for putting the museum in a building that was too small and old to properly house the intended collection, and despite winning approval in both House and Senate committees the bill died once more.
In 2001, Lewis and Representative J. C. Watts re-introduced legislation for a museum in the House of Representatives. Under the leadership of its new Secretary, Lawrence M. Small, the Smithsonian Board of Regents reversed course yet again in June 2001 and agreed to support a stand-alone National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The Smithsonian asked Congress to establish a federally funded study commission. Congress swiftly agreed, and on December 29, President George W. Bush signed legislation establishing a 23-member commission to study the need for a museum, how to raise the funds to build and support it, and where it should be located. The study commission's work took nearly two years, not the anticipated nine months. In November 2002, in anticipation of a positive outcome, the insurance company AFLAC donated $1 million (~$1.66 million in 2024) to help build the museum.
On April 3, 2003, the study commission released its final report. As expected, the commission said a museum was needed, and recommended an extremely high-level site: A plot of land adjacent to the Capitol Reflecting Pool, bounded by Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues NW and 1st and 3rd Streets NW. The commission ruled out establishing the museum within the Arts & Industries Building, concluding renovations to the structure would be too costly. It considered a site just west of the National Museum of American History and a site on the southwest Washington waterfront, but rejected both.
The commission considered whether the museum should have an independent board of trustees (similar to that of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) or a board answerable both to the Smithsonian and independent trustees (similar to that of the National Gallery of Art), but rejected these approaches in favor of a board appointed by and answerable only to the Smithsonian Board of Regents.
The commission proposed a 350,000 square-foot museum that would cost $360 million to build. Half the construction funds would come from private money, half from the federal government. As Congress considered the legislation, the museum's location became the major sticking point. Various members of the public, Congress, and advocacy groups felt the Capitol Hill site was too prominent and made the National Mall look crowded.
To save the bill, backers of the museum said in mid-November 2003 that they would abandon their push for the Capitol Hill site. The compromise saved the legislation: The House passed the "National Museum of African American History and Culture Act" (Pub. L. 108-184 (text) (PDF)) on November 19, and the Senate followed suit two days later. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on December 16.
The legislation appropriated $17 million for museum planning and a site selection process, and $15 million for educational programs. The legislation established a committee to select a site, and required it to report its recommendation within 12 months. The site selection committee did not issue its recommendation until January 31, 2006-a full 13 months late. It recommended the site west of the National Museum of American History.
On March 15, 2005, the Smithsonian named Lonnie G. The National Museum of African American History and Culture Council (the museum's board of trustees) sponsored a competition in 2008 to design a 350,000 sq ft (33,000 m2) building with three stories below-ground and five stories above-ground. The building was limited to the 5-acre (20,000 m2) site chosen by the site selection committee, had to be LEED Gold certified, and had to meet stringent federal security standards. The cost of construction was limited to $500 million.
The competition criteria specified that the winning design had to respect the history and views of the Washington Monument as well as demonstrate an understanding of the African-American experience. The winning design was required to reflect optimism, spirituality, and joy, but also acknowledge and incorporate "the dark corners" of the African-American experience. The museum design was required to function as a museum, but also be able to host cultural events of various kinds.
Hundreds of architects and firms were invited to participate in the design competition. Under federal law, the National Capital Planning Commission, the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and the D.C. Historic Preservation Commission all have review and approval rights over construction in the metropolitan D.C. area. As the design went through these agencies for approval, it was slightly revised. The building was moved toward the southern boundary of its plot of land, to give a better view of the Washington Monument from Constitution Avenue.
On June 10, 2013, media magnate Oprah Winfrey donated $12 million to the NMAAHC. This was in addition to the $1 million she donated to the museum in 2007. The design of the architectural scrim which surrounds the building was changed in September 2012. The proposed building itself was a box-like structure. The three-part corona of the building's design was created by a structure only minimally attached to the building.
The exterior of this structure, whose frames lean outward to create the corona, consisted of a thin screen or "scrim" perforated by geometrical patterns based on historic iron grilles found in African-American communities in Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana. The original design proposed that the scrim be made of bronze, which would have made the museum the only one on the National Mall whose exterior was not made of limestone or marble. Cost issues forced the architects to change this to bronze-painted aluminum in September 2012.
