For decades, predominantly white institutions have minimized and refused to document or preserve the long legacy of Black stories and cultural experiences. Black archives and museums — spaces like the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum and Afro Charities’ upcoming Martha E. Murphy Research Institute in the historic Upton Mansion — have existed to fill those gaps.
They provide spaces for younger generations of Black people to get a more complete picture of where they come from. Black historical institutions combat centuries of negative stereotypes about Black communities by celebrating Black accomplishments throughout our time in this country. This, in turn, can help young Black people feel more connected to and proud of their Blackness while building their overall self-esteem.
So when protecting Black art, history, and culture is in their name, museums and archives can’t run from who they are when that work comes under fire — nor do they want to.
“It’s so important to preserve memory,” Reginald. F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture President Terri Lee Freeman said.
“It is very easy to rewrite a story when the only people who know the truth are dead. If you don’t have archives, if you don’t have collections, if you don’t have the griots and the storytellers, who is going to tell the truth?”
“It’s so important to preserve memory … If you don’t have archives, if you don’t have collections, if you don’t have the griots and the storytellers, who is going to tell the truth?”
Reginald. F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture President Terri Lee Freeman
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has gone on a campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion, issuing a number of executive orders that ended equity-related grants. The National Park Service in September ordered national parks to remove any imagery or information connected to slavery and Native American displacement. In addition to directly targeting the Smithsonian and its exhibits — with particular focus on the National Museum of African American History and Culture — the funding cuts have especially impacted institutions focused on preserving and protecting Black history across the country.
Freeman said museum leaders met at the beginning of the year to discuss what they saw as “an assault on arts and culture of marginalized groups.” She said the board knew they must work even harder to protect Black history rather than shrink as they saw the assault happening on cultural institutions across the country.
The museum holds more than 400 years of Black history, showcasing African American contributions in politics, arts, media, sports, and more. To commemorate its 20th anniversary this year, the museum launched the TITAN exhibit, which celebrates the work and legacy of its namesake, lawyer and businessman Reginald F. Lewis.
Freeman said that the museum’s commitment to protect Black art, history, and culture has been part of its identity since the beginning, but in an environment where the values that drive diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are under attack, she said it was time to remind people who they are and “really shout it from the rooftop.”
Amid the recent large-scale assault on Black history, Baltimore institutions charged with preserving centuries-old artifacts and stories have been navigating an adverse political and funding landscape while leaning further into their role to keep people connected to their heritage and collective cultural memory.
These funding cuts go deeper than erasing Black history; they suppress the voices of those who share and protect Black stories, which puts the future of Black history at risk.
The Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, which holds 15 million Black history artifacts dating back to the 1780s, has had to lay off half its staff due to federal funding cuts.
The tenuous situation with the federal government is even more reason for people to directly support Black institutions with memberships, subscriptions, and regular donations, said Savannah Wood, executive director of Afro Charities, which manages AFRO Archives, a repository of more than a century of Black history in Baltimore and across the globe.
“To have a dispersed network of supporters giving $5 a month, $10 a month — even if one of them can’t afford it that month, you still have all these other people who are supporting you,” Wood said.
Afro Charities also cares for the AFRO American newspaper, which was founded in 1892 in Baltimore and is one of the longest standing Black publications in the country.
The AFRO Archives holds a collection of thousands of original AFRO American newspapers, as well as more than 3 million photographs, rare audio/visual materials, and thousands of letters between publishers of the AFRO American and civil rights leaders.
When institutions have to rely heavily on funding from one source — as was the case with the Amistad Research Center, which had 40% of its annual budget coming from the federal government — they are much more vulnerable to “regime change,” Wood said.
Wood said that potential funders have asked her organization to change language in grant applications to be “more competitive for funding.” She said she’s seen some funders do this to advocate for Black archives to succeed in this less-welcoming landscape, even doubling down on their support in this moment by talking about the importance of Black archival work. But with funders who don’t take this stance, institutions like AFRO Archives have an added challenge when their focus on preserving Black culture is within their name, Wood said, which makes it harder to covertly apply for valuable funding from grantmakers that have pulled back on their commitments to racial justice.
Johns Hopkins University’s Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, which is independently funded, is facing similar challenges due to shifts in philanthropy, said founding director Lawrence P. Jackson. The center was founded in 2017 to “foster reparative links between Johns Hopkins University” and Baltimore’s Black communities through memorializing and sharing the city’s unique legacy of art and music — further connecting the staff, students, and faculty at Hopkins to the community in which they learn, live, and work.
In this new climate, the center is navigating ways to seek funding to continue its work beyond this year — from grant applications to promoting the cultural importance of their free art and jazz events, celebrating jazz artist-in-residence Terry Thompson, as well as a lecture series on Black public health inequities named in honor of Baltimore activist Helena Hicks. Furthering the center’s work to preserve West Baltimore’s art, music, and cultural history, it also hosts the mobile Digital Humanities Lab where visitors can digitize their family photos and memorabilia and record oral histories of Black experiences for future generations to learn from. That digital preservation is essential because once these stories, photos, and historic documents are lost to time or neglect, they can never be recovered.
“The horror story for us is always when an ancestor makes their transition, and their descendants or their caregivers are cleaning up the house, and they don’t know what to do with papers and photographs and they throw them away,” Jackson said. “Really, that’s our raison d’etre, and what we want to be able to do is to help people understand different opportunities and possibilities for preservation.”
Jackson and the team at the Billie Holiday Center continue to pursue new and meaningful research opportunities in the hopes that the center can continue protecting the legacy of art and cultural creation in the city. Jackson said they are currently focusing on “The Birth of Jazz in Baltimore: 1819-1948,” an upcoming research project that recovers the history of Black performance spaces in Baltimore through preserving mementos, photos, and invitation cards that had been preserved by “the devoted nightclub goer, the Thursday night dancer, and the fan of the raucous marching band.”
For the long legacy of Baltimore’s Black music scene to continue, Jackson hopes to see more Black control of educational institutions so young people have better opportunities to gain a deeper appreciation of Black art, music, and cultural expression in spaces that help them connect history to the popular things young people love today.
It’s essential that young people learn about their history, said Joanne Martin, co-founder of The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum. The museum hosts teens through the city’s YouthWorks program each summer and trains them to be tour guides for visitors of all ages from across the country — including other teens.
After more than 40 years of leading the museum, Martin says her greatest reward has been seeing young visitors get excited about Black history by learning about it from their peers. The YouthWorks tour guides often start their summer hesitant to dig into learning the history, Martin said, but by the end of the summer, she’s seen them excitedly embrace the museum as their own as they earn their docent title.
The museum hosted an 80-person tour group from Philadelphia over the summer, and the YouthWorks teens were able to proudly share the history of their designated section of the museum, Martin said, whether that was the Underground Railroad, the Civil Rights Movement, or talking about Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, whom Martin said her co-founding husband, Elmer, would call the “guardians of our history.”
The teens told the group that they were sharing “history that they don’t teach in school.”
Most importantly, Martin said, the teens learn through their time at the museum to tell Black stories “uncompromisingly and unapologetically” in any environment — that they shouldn’t run away from the sad and complex parts of their history but instead push other people to join them in their educational journey, which she said she’s already seen them do.
“I know I can depend on young people to know these stories and pass them along,” Martin said, “and we have to give them a sense of the importance of those stories.”