The 100-Year Mission To Create
The National Museum Of African American History And Culture
By Robert L. Wilkins

TIME: How the Story of Black History Month Parallels the Fight for a Black History Museum

excerpted from Time
By Arica L. Coleman
January 31, 2001

When Black History Month begins on Wednesday, the annual observance will come, for the first time, with a new way for Americans to learn about that history: the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which opened in September. It’s an important milestone, as the fight to create such a museum actually dates back to before Black History Month was conceived.

As TIME has explained, Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week, the precursor to Black History Month, in 1926, as an initiative to make African-American achievements a permanent part of American public history. When the observance was formally declared on a national level in 1976, it was characterized by President Gerald Ford as “the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Ironically, 1976 was the eighth consecutive year that legislation to create the NMAAHC had failed in Congress. Robert L. Wilkins, who chaired the NMAAHC Presidential Commission under George W. Bush, detailed the history of the museum in his book Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100 year Mission to Create the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which began with a simple question, “Why don’t we have a museum to tell all of those stories?”

Wilkins found the answer in a complicated narrative that began in 1915, the year of the 50th anniversary of the Union’s Civil War victory. The Committee of Colored Citizens, which had raised funds and organized social activities for black veterans visiting the nation’s capital — but which had been barred from social activities organized by the Grand Army of the Republic, which according to Wilkins was, “the preeminent organization of Union veterans” — decided to use the leftover funds as seed money for “a monument in this city to the memory of the colored soldiers and sailors who fought in the wars in our country.”

Read more on Time.com.

 

Arica L. Coleman is the author of That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia and chair of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories at the Organization of American Historians.

Posted in News & Events on February, 2017