Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Smithsonian’s black history museum popular destination in DC
In its first year, the Smithsonian’s new black museum has become the nation’s top temple to blackness, an Afrocentric shrine on the National Mall where people of all races, colors and creed are flocking to experience — and leave behind for posterity — the highs and lows of African-American life in the United States.
“This has become more than a museum. This has become a pilgrimage site,” said Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in an interview with The Associated Press.
The nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, opened the new Smithsonian to a standing roomonly crowd on Sept. 24, 2016, with the ringing of a church bell. Since then, the Smithsonian’s 19th — and so far, most popular — museum has only become more beloved. Free advance timed tickets sell out months in advance and people line up outside the doors every morning in hopes of snagging rare same-day passes.
To celebrate the oneyear anniversary, the museum extended its hours this weekend so more people could get inside to see exhibits designed to take visitors through African-American history in this country: from slavery, on the lower level, to a reproduction of Oprah Winfrey’s television set upstairs and artifacts from Obama’s first presidential campaign.
Ground for the $540 million museum was broken in 2012 on a 5-acre tract near the Washington Monument. Construction was completed in 2016. Millions of donors contributed $315 million in private funds ahead of the opening.