The museum also features a series of openings— 'lenses' — throughout the exhibition spaces that frame views of the Washington Monument, the White House and other Smithsonian museums on the National Mall. These framed perspectives remind visitors that the museum presents a view of American through the lens of the African American experience.
Marian Anderson — the first African-American soloist to perform at the Metropolitan Opera — own jacket and skirt. NMAAHC images
These exhibitions will feature some of the more that 34,000 artifacts the museum has collected since the legislation establishing it was signed in 2003. The museum's collections are designed to illustrate the major periods of African American history. Highlights include: a segregation-era Southern Railway car (c. 1920), Nat Turner’s Bible (c. 1830s), Michael Jackson’s fedora (c. 1992), a slave cabin from Edisto Island, S.C. plantation (c. early 1800s), Harriet Tubman's hymnal (c. 1876) and works of art by Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden and Henry O. Tanner.
While under construction, the museum has had a gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Since 2009, the museum has opened seven exhibitions in the space including Through the African American Lens: Selections from the Permanent Collection (on view now), The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise and Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863 and The March on Washington, 1963.
The museum's first exhibition, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Photographs, opened in 2007 at the International Center for Photography in New York and toured 15 cities.
In addition to exhibitions, the museum has also launched several education and research programs. "Save Our African American Treasures" was launched in Chicago in January 2008 and is one of the museum's signature programs. Participants work with conservation specialists and historians to learn how to identify and preserve items of historical value, including photographs, jewelry, military uniforms and textiles.
Croix de Guerre medal; General John J. Pershing assigned the 369th to the 16th Division ofthe French Army. With the French, the Harlem Hellfighters fought at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. All told they spent 191 days in combat, longer than any other American unit in the war. "My men never retire, they go forward or they die," said Colonel Hayward. Indeed, the 369th was the first Allied unit to reach the Rhine. NMAAHC images
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