Tonya Bolden - How to Build a Museum: Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

The meeting of the Colored Citizens Committee for the entertainment of Old Veterans and Delegates to the G.A.R. Encampment... was very well attended last Saturday evening.

The Washington Bee, June 19, 1915

Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture was a long time coming. It was a hundred-year hope, a hundred-year dream rooted in the desire for a tribute in the United States capital to black patriots.

The dream began to take shape in September 1915 during a big reunion: the Grand Army of the Republics Forty-ninth National Encampment. The GAR was an organization of veterans who had served in the Unions armed forces during the Civil War (18611865). Fifty years after the war ended, thousands of former servicemen from more than forty states poured into the nations capital. They came with war wounds and disabilities, with medals and memorabilia. They came with memories of battles lost and won, of fallen comrades, of heroism unsung. Their average age was seventy-three. Despite old age and infirmities, more than twenty thousand veterans proudly marched in the big parade up Pennsylvania Avenue.

A contingent of those GAR members were African American, representing the roughly 200,000 black boys and men who had fought for the Union on land and sea. During the encampment, black Washingtonians saw to it that these Civil War survivors were properly housed, fed, and feted. Civic leader and government worker Ferdinand D. Lee headed up the committee in charge of this hospitality.

September 29, 1915: The Grand Army of the Republics parade up Pennsylvania Avenue, Americas Main Street.

Before the GAR Encampment ended on October 2, Ferdinand D. Lee and company made up their minds to take their pride in sable soldiers and sailors a step further. They rallied around an idea already in the air, and within months of the GAR reunion, Ferdinand D. Lee was at the helm of a new organization: the National Memorial Association for the Erection of a Monument at the National Capital in Honor of the Negro Soldiers and Sailors Who Fought in the Wars of Our Country. The group became known for short as the National Memorial Association (NMA).

A photograph (circa 18641865) and the military I.D. tag of Sergeant Qualls Tibbs (18361922), a Virginia-born member of the United States Colored Troops, 27th Regiment, Company E.

Souvenir badge belonging to Alexander Hill, 54th Massachusetts Infantry (18641865).

When the NMA got going in February 1916, Washington, DC, was not the marvel of memorials, monuments, and museums that it is today. The colossal Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain fronting Union Station was only a few years old, and the elegant Dupont Circle fountain hadnt been erected. The capital did not have half the outdoor sculptures that it boasts today.

The NMAs vision of the dream, in a pamphlet circa 1926.

The National Mall, which had once been bordered by homes, shops, vendors carts, and holding pens for enslaved people bound for the Deep South, had only a handful of splendors. They included the Smithsonians red sandstone Castle building and its Arts and Industries Building, and the Washington Monument.

Four years later, in 1920, when the Lincoln Memorial was still under construction, legislation to create a commission on a memorial to black servicemen was pending in Congress, which had no African American members. There was little support for this legislation, and the bill died. Despite the setback, the National Memorial Association continued to hold rallies to raise money for a memorial. They kept lobbying politicians to support the dream. And in black communities, interest in the idea surged.

The July 1918 issue of W. E. B. Du Boiss The Crisis magazine. The focus: education.

In the early 1900s, black pride was on the rise. AfroPuerto Rican Arturo Schomburg, a bibliophile and self-taught historian, urged blacks to dig up and dig into their heritage. Jamaican-born journalist and entrepreneur Marcus Garvey launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Scholar-activist Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was editor-in-chief of this Civil Rights organizations magazine, The Crisis. Month after month, The Crisis reported on the challenges blacks faced in the age of government-sanctioned segregation, along with black strivings and achievements despite these challenges. Another NAACP founder and an NMA member, Mary Church Terrell, crusaded for racial justice and womens rights in lectures and articles, and as a member of various organizations. Whats more, in cities around the nation, painters, photographers, writers, singers, dancers, and intellectuals of African descent were finding and establishing more outlets for their talent. This was all part and parcel of the New Negro Movement, a push for positive representation and greater participation in politics and other areas of American life.