Museums:
Reflecting on the reopening of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, one of the first museums to shine a light on racial violence in the United States
A decade after its physical location was forced to close, America’s Black Holocaust Museum has reopened in a new space.
The building was hot. Damp dress shirts and evaporating makeup hot, the mobile air conditioners and industrial fans no match for the blaze. But the 400 in attendance were (mostly) smiling, happy to see America’s Black Holocaust Museum restored to the Milwaukee corner it had long anchored, in a new home.
ABHM was founded by a social justice organizer and the only known survivor of a lynching. In 1930, a 16-year-old James Cameron was nearly murdererd in Marion, Indiana, for a crime he didn’t commit; he devoted his adult life to telling his story. He settled in Milwaukee in 1952. And in 1988, he bought an empty North Side boxing gym from the City of Milwaukee for a dollar to open the ABHM. That location closed in 2008, and in the decade since has existed as a virtual museum, with more than 3.5 million people a year from over 200 countries visiting its six online galleries.
When ABHM reopens next month, it will be led by a board chaired by Ralph Hollman, and interim executive Brad Pruitt. The new museum will complement the online experience by continuing the late Cameron’s vision of illuminating the experience of black people, starting before slavery, through the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, and into life today.
“We’ll also have community space, programs that initiate dialogue and partnerships with local entities,” says Pruitt.
Today, Cameron still draws a national lens to a conversation about race. He believed that truth would set Americans free and make racial reconciliation possible. Residents have welcomed a return of history and truth to North and Vel Phillips avenues. And on that morning in June, with all of us celebrating and sweltering together inside the hollow of a new promise, the city beamed back at the sun.