The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened its doors to the public on September 24, 2016. It is the nineteenth museum of the Smithsonian Institution and the only one devoted exclusively to the documentation of Black American life. Its construction had been formally proposed in 1915, authorized by Congress in 2003 under the George W. Bush administration, and presided over at its dedication by President Barack Obama, the first Black American to hold the office.
The building itself, designed by David Adjaye and Phil Freelon with Davis Brody Bond, is clad in a corona of bronze-colored aluminum panels whose pattern references the ironwork of New Orleans and Charleston — ironwork that was, in its original period, produced by enslaved Black craftsmen. The building's three ascending tiers are inspired by the three-part crown of a Yoruba caryatid sculpture in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
The collection, assembled over thirteen years of acquisitions led by founding director Lonnie G. Bunch III (now Secretary of the entire Smithsonian), numbers roughly forty thousand objects. It includes shackles from slave ships, Harriet Tubman's hymnal, Nat Turner's Bible, a segregated Southern Railway passenger car, Chuck Berry's Cadillac, Emmett Till's glass-topped casket, the Woolworth's lunch counter from Greensboro, and garments worn by Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and Michelle Obama.
The museum has been, since its opening day, the most consistently and heavily attended Smithsonian museum on the Mall. Free timed-entry passes, required for the first three years of its operation to manage demand, were released in batches that were routinely exhausted within minutes. More than ten million people have passed through its doors in the decade since its opening.
