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Established | 1988 |
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Location | Milwaukee, WI |
Type | History Museum |
Founder | James Cameron |
President | Dr. Robert "Bert" Davis |
Website | https://www.abhmuseum.org |
America's Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) is dedicated to the history of the Black Holocaust in America. The museum was founded in 1988 by James Cameron, who became well known after surviving a lynching. [1]
Cameron died in 2006, and in 2008, the museum's board of directors announced that the museum would be closed temporarily because of the reduced funding that occurred during the 2008 Great Recession. [2] [3] A foundation was created in 2012 to continue Cameron's legacy and vision. In 2012, the foundation re-opened ABHM as a 3,200+ page virtual museum available on their website.
In 2016, the foundation announced plans to move the physical museum to Milwaukee's historic Bronzeville neighborhood, with an originally-planned 2019 re-opening, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the re-opening was delayed. Shortly following, an anonymous $10M donation in late 2021 was received, and the museum re-opened in February 2022. [4] [5]
After surviving a lynching at age 16 in which two companions died, and subsequently spending five years in prison, James Cameron was determined to do something important with the rest of his life. He got an education, worked hard, raised five children, and spent his life studying the African-American experience in the United States. He worked in civil rights, wrote independent articles, pamphlets, and a memoir called A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story. Cameron also amassed a large collection of materials and artifacts related to African-American history. [6]
After retirement, Cameron and his wife visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel. He thought that museum's focus on the personal history of individuals and their stories led to a better understanding of the reality of the Holocaust. Then living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1988 he founded his museum with the help of philanthropist Daniel Bader, having collected materials on the African-American experience in the US for many years.
ABHM's facility, located in Milwaukee, is the only memorial and museum that interprets the African American experience in the United States as an ongoing holocaust (series of mass atrocities) from the time of captivity in Africa to the present day. The museum examines the tragic legacies of slavery and promotes racial repair, reconciliation, and healing through developing awareness and empathy.
Cameron died in 2006; in 2008, the museum's board of directors announced that the museum would be closed temporarily because of financial problems. [2] [3] The original museum was demolished in early 2017. The site, including the former Garfield Avenue School, was redeveloped as the Historic Garfield School Redevelopment Program.
On April 4, 2017, the developers broke ground on a new building called The Griot on the footprint (site) of the original museum. [7] The new museum is located on the ground floor of the Griot and was scheduled to open in 2019. [8] Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the opening of the museum was put on hold. [4] It wasn't until February of 2022 that the physical museum finally reopened. [5]
A new ABHM was established as a "virtual museum" by ABHM's Board of Directors, after the bricks-and-mortar museum closed. The new format came online as a virtual museum on February 25, 2012, in celebration of Cameron's birthday and Black History Month. [9]
The online museum is operated by the nonprofit Dr. James Cameron Legacy Foundation Inc. The virtual museum attracts 5 million visitors per year from over 200 countries. The "online" experience complements the "onsite" experience by recounting many of the seldom-told and untold stories of both tragedy and triumph, through short texts, pictures, videos, documents and links to further reading and other resources.
While there is also a Black Holocaust memorial in Savannah, Georgia, the ABHM facility serves as a center for education and scholarship related to the Black Holocaust and as a supportive forum for sharing thoughts about race and racism in America.
Exposing visitors to historical aspects of African-American cultural identity is achieved through educational exhibits, special programming, and guided tours about seven distinct historic eras. These eras are also interpreted in the Virtual Museum:
ABHM welcomes visitors of all races and backgrounds, and encourages community understanding of the nation's history of racism, prejudice, social change and cross-cultural understanding.
Milwaukee is the most populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee is the 31st largest city in the United States, the fifth-largest city in the Midwestern United States, and the second largest city on Lake Michigan's shore behind Chicago.
The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions for African American people, as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular, continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants, as African Americans searched for social reprieve. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants, for the most part, moved to the then-largest cities in the United States at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States. There, African Americans established influential communities of their own. Despite the loss of leaving their homes in the South, and all the barriers faced by the migrants in their new homes, the migration was an act of individual and collective agency, which changed the course of American history, a "declaration of independence" written by their actions.
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The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill (1918) was first introduced in the 65th United States Congress by Representative Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican from St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States House of Representatives as H.R. 11279 in order “to protect citizens of the United States against lynching in default of protection by the States.” It was intended to establish lynching as a federal crime. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was re-introduced in subsequent sessions of United States Congress and passed, 230 to 119, by the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922, but its passage was halted in the United States Senate by a filibuster by Southern Democrats, who formed a powerful block. Southern Democrats justified their opposition to the bill by arguing that lynchings were a response to rapes and proclaiming that lynchings were an issue that should be left for states to deal with.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimised ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South because the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states.
J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith were young African-American men who were murdered in a spectacle lynching by a mob of thousands on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. They were taken from jail cells, beaten, and hanged from a tree in the county courthouse square. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. A third African-American suspect, 16-year-old James Cameron, had also been arrested and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob; an unknown woman and a local sports hero intervened, and he was returned to jail. Cameron later stated that Shipp and Smith had committed the murder but that he had run away before that event.
James Cameron was an American civil rights activist. In the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Indiana. He also served as Indiana's State Director of the Office of Civil Liberties from 1942 to 1950.
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Bronzeville Children's Museum is a museum in the Calumet Heights community area of the South Side of Chicago. It is the first and only African American children's museum in the United States. Founded in 1998, the museum moved to its current location at 9301 South Stony Island Avenue in the Pill Hill neighborhood in 2008.
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The Griot Museum of Black History is a wax museum in St. Louis, Missouri, founded in 1997. Originally named The Black World History Wax Museum, the organization changed its name to The Griot Museum of Black History in 2009. In some west African countries, the griot, is a historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet and/or musician. The griot is a repository of oral tradition and is often seen as a societal leader who preserves and shares cultural traditions of a community. Likewise, the museum collects, preserves, and shares the stories, culture, and history of Black people with a focus on those with a regional connection to St. Louis.
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