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Museum of African American History

The Museum of African American History was founded to preserve and interpret the contributions of people of African descent and those who have found common cause with them in the struggle for liberty and justice for all Americans. Through permanent and rotating exhibits, a wide range of public and education programs ranging from debates to concerts, and summer youth camps to Underground Railroad Overnight Adventures, it places the African American experience in an accurate social, cultural and historical perspective. Incorporated in 1967, the Museum is nationally and internationally known for The African Meeting House, a National Historic Landmark, and Abiel Smith School on Boston's Beacon Hill, The African Meeting House on Nantucket, and Black Heritage Trails® in Boston and Nantucket.

http://www.afroammuseum.org/

Ilyasah Shabazz: Growing Up X

Thu, Jun 11, 2015

To commemorate the 90th birthday of the slain civil rights leader **Malcolm X**, critically acclaimed author **Ilyasah Shabazz** talked about her new book celebrating the life of her father. Shabazz shares personal reflections from her early years with him through excerpts, speaks about events that inspired his life's work, and tells how his voice, beliefs, and lessons were a vital part of her childhood and a powerful influence on who she has become.

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Civil Rights Movement Series

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Museum of African American History
Remembering the Life and Legacy of Abraham Lincoln

Tue, Apr 14, 2015

"Abraham Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than one year of formal schooling, and became the nation's greatest president," wrote Harvard's Dr. John Stauffer, an author and leading scholar on Lincoln, antislavery and social protest movements. One hundred fifty years ago on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, shot the 16th President during a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came just five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. Lincoln's assassination united blacks and whites in the North as never before and "made us kin," as Frederick Douglass said. Dr. Stauffer calls this "Lincoln's most enduring legacy: as inspiration for Americans of all stripes to unite and work together to fulfill, finally, the nation's ideals of freedom and equality of opportunity for all."

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Black Votes Matter

Thu, Apr 2, 2015

Museum of African American History, National Voting Rights Museum and New Democracy Coalition present **Black Votes Matter: The Mississippi Theater of the Civil Rights Movement and Voting Rights Act.** Bob Moses’ vision of grass roots organizing led him to become a leader in the civil rights movement and Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. He initiated and organized voter registration drives, sit-ins, and Freedom Schools for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that he appreciated Moses' fresh ideas, calling his "contribution to the freedom struggle in America" an "inspiration." Nearly 40 years later, the renowned activist began organizing again, this time as teacher and founder of the national math literacy program called the Algebra Project. His work was recognized with a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, which he used to found the Algebra Project. He argues that the crisis in math literacy in poor communities is as urgent as the crisis of political access in Mississippi in 1961. Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (Photo: President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, via [Wikimedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 ""))

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Civil Rights Movement Series

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Museum of African American History
African Americans' Participation in the Environmental Movement

Thu, Mar 26, 2015

**Dr. Carolyn Finney** talks about her new book, _Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors_. Her work bridges the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography. She argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the "great outdoors" and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces. Dr. Finney, whose love of environment was inspired by a backpacking trip around the world and numerous years living in Nepal, explores the relationship of African Americans to the environment and to the environmental movement. Drawing on “green” conversations with African descendants from coast to coast, she considers the power of resistance and resilience to the environmental and social challenges in our cities and beyond. Now an assistant professor in environmental science, policy and management at the University of California Berkeley, Dr. Finney also is a member of the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board. As such, she works with the National Park Service to respond to America’s changing demographics and diversify the ranks of visitors and employees.

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Museum of African American History
Askia Touré: From Pyramids to Stars

Thu, Mar 12, 2015

**Askia M. Touré**, an award-winning poet, author, social activist, and African American Studies professor, is a fountain of fascinating oral history about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), civil rights campaigns, the Black Panthers, and the 'Black Arts' movements, of which he is a co-founding architect. A lifelong interest in the history of Africa inspired Touré to use his work to restore the lost heritage of African American people. Along with Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and other black writers, Touré helped shape the legacy of the 'Black Arts' Movement and profoundly changed how race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, politics, and art were and are understood. Touré is featured in a host of anthologies, and authored five books, including From the Pyramids to the Projects, From the Projects to the Stars, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature, and Dawnsong!, which received an award from the African-American Literature and Culture Society, an affiliate of the American Literature Association. Touré recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Pen Oakland.

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Museum of African American History
Cheryl LaRoche: Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad

Thu, Mar 20, 2014

"Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, Dr. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche's book, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad, examines the ""geography of resistance"" and tells the powerful, and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression. This enlightening study uncovers a new historical perspective on pathways to freedom from enslavement. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have concentrated on ""frightened fugitive slaves"" and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities ' and the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. Outstanding among them was Boston's powerful community on the north slope of Beacon Hill, considered the nexus of the abolitionist movement. Exploring the religious and fraternal institutions at the heart of these free black communities, LaRoche demonstrates how the AME and Baptist churches and Prince Hall Masons, in addition to Quakers, provided both physical and social structures that fostered escape from slavery. LaRoche shows how landscape features, such as waterways, iron forges, and caves, played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Dr. LaRoche, a lecturer in American studies at the University of Maryland, also has served as a consultant for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, archaeological conservator for the African Burial Ground Project in New York City, and a history scholar for the Museum of African American History. In 2011, The Society for Historical Archaeology awarded her the John L. Cotter Award for exemplary work in the study of African American archaeology."

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Toure: Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness - What it Means to be Black Now

Thu, Jan 26, 2012

"Touré, writer, cultural critic, and TV personality discusses his newest book *Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness: What it Means to be Black Now*, which draws on interviews with over 100 prominent African-Americans from art to politics to journalism to academia - as well as his own thoughts and experiences. Here he reflects on his experience growing up in the Boston area in the turbulent 1970's, and his time in college in Atlanta, providing a springboard for analysis of phenomena such as stereotype threat, micro-aggressions, resume checking, and the white and black gaze. Watch highlights of this video, and see more stories, events, people and voices of black New England at *Basic Black's* [Black Perspectives Now>](http://www.wgbh.org/basicblack/blackperspectives.cfm).

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Museum of African American History
A Profile in Color: A Conversation with Reverend Michael E. Haynes

Wed, Feb 8, 2012

"Reverend Michael E. Haynes provides insight into his life growing up in Boston, his 40-year ministry at the historic Twelfth Baptist Church, and friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in this intimate conversation. He reflects on significant moments such as his first trip to the south, how his faith altered his course in life, and the gentrification of Boston neighborhoods that he has witnessed over the decades. Reverend Haynes joined Twelfth Baptist Church's ministerial staff in 1951, along with Dr. King, while both were Divinity students in Boston. In addition to his career in ministry, he has been a sports writer and served as a state representative."

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Museum of African American History
Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom

Thu, May 8, 2008

David W. Blight, Yale professor and historian, discusses his latest work, *A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation*.

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Museum of African American History
US Supreme Court and Race

Wed, Mar 10, 2010

Two Harvard legal scholars discuss the complex and often misunderstood history of how decisions by the United States Supreme Court have affected the legal status of racial minorities in America, and ask if the Supreme Court has been a friend or a foe to African Americans. Conventional wisdom suggests that the high court, throughout its history, has consistently defended racial minorities from discriminatory policies. That interpretation may be more sympathetic than the Court’s actual record warrants. In a talk at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Law Professor Michael Klarman suggests that the Supreme Court, more often than not, has been a regressive force on racial issues. Klarman is introduced, and then joined in conversation, by his Harvard Law School colleague Professor Randall Kennedy.

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