40 Fun Facts About National Museum of African American History and Culture

Which president rang a church bell to open the National Museum of African American History and Culture?

Barack Obama rang the Freedom Bell with four generations of the Bonner family, led by 99-year-old Ruth. The bell came from a Virginia church founded by and for African Americans in 1776.

Which talk show host has a 350-seat theater named for her at the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Oprah Winfrey gave the museum $21 million in all, the largest gift it had received by the time its doors opened.

Whose glass-topped casket, kept open at his 1955 funeral, is preserved by the Smithsonian?

Emmett Till was 14 when he was murdered in Mississippi, and his mother insisted the world see what had been done to him. His death became a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

Which British monarch gave Harriet Tubman the shawl held by the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Queen Victoria's gift of linen and silk sits in the collection beside Tubman's hymnal, her eating utensils and one of the few known photographic portraits of her.

Which rock and roll star's red Cadillac convertible sits in the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Chuck Berry owned the cherry-red Cadillac. He was among the first musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986.

Black World War II airmen who trained in the Smithsonian's Stearman biplane were educated at which Alabama institute?

Tuskegee Institute educated the airmen who carry its name. The museum's Stearman, a PT-13D trainer flown by the Army Air Forces, was used to teach them in 1944.

The Smithsonian's African American history museum shows which president before a wall naming people he enslaved?

Thomas Jefferson's statue stands before a wall of bricks bearing the names of people he enslaved, more than 600 in his lifetime, including his own children.

Which funk bandleader's Mothership stage prop landed in the National Museum of African American History and Culture?

George Clinton's original Mothership was scrapped in the early 1980s, so the museum's 1,200-pound prop is a replica he had built in the mid-1990s.

On the day of her 1955 arrest in Montgomery, which activist was sewing a dress that the Smithsonian holds?

Rosa Parks was sewing the dress on December 1, 1955, the day she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, the act that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.

Which NBA star's uniform from the 2008 Finals is in the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Kobe Bryant wore it in the 2008 NBA Finals, the year he was named league MVP, and he and his wife Vanessa were founding donors of the museum.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture stands on land carved from which landmark's grounds?

Washington Monument grounds supplied the five-acre site, a plot the L'Enfant Plan of 1791 had already set aside for a museum or other building.

Which founding director of the Smithsonian's African American history museum went on to lead the whole Smithsonian?

Lonnie Bunch ran the museum from 2005 to 2019, then became the first African American and the first historian to head the Smithsonian Institution.

Which architect, knighted in 2017, was lead designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture?

David Adjaye, born in Tanzania to a Ghanaian diplomat, was picked in 2009 to lead a team that also included the Freelon Group and Davis Brody Bond.

Which West African people's crowns inspired the tiered shape of the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Yoruba crowns worn by an oba, or king, gave the building its three stacked tiers, borrowed from the top of a sculpture by Olowe of Ise that is displayed inside.

The Smithsonian's African American history museum copies ironwork from New Orleans and which other Southern city?

Charleston's historic iron grilles, found in its African American communities, set the geometric pattern cut into the building's 3,600 bronze-colored panels.

The bronze-look panels on the Smithsonian's African American history museum are really made of which metal?

Aluminum, painted to look like bronze, replaced the real thing in 2012 to save money, a swap the Commission of Fine Arts approved but criticized.

Which civil rights veteran in Congress pushed bills for a Smithsonian African American history museum from 1988?

John Lewis introduced the first bill with Mickey Leland in 1988 and kept at it for 15 years, until the act he sponsored in the House became law in 2003.

Which NBA star gave $2.5 million to back the Smithsonian's exhibit on boxer Muhammad Ali?

LeBron James made the gift in November 2016, two months after the museum opened, to support its display on Ali's accomplishments.

Which New Orleans-born jazz star owned the Selmer trumpet in the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Louis Armstrong, the trumpeter and singer, was nicknamed Satchmo, a shortening of Satchelmouth.

Which gymnast's equipment from the 2012 Olympics, where she won the all-around gold, is held by the Smithsonian?

Gabby Douglas was the first African American to win the individual all-around title, and the first American gymnast to take team and all-around golds at the same Games.

Which leader of an 1831 Virginia slave rebellion owned the small Bible given to the Smithsonian in 2012?

Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher his followers called The Prophet, led the uprising in Southampton County. A local family kept his Bible until donating it.

A letter by which leader of the Haitian Revolution is held by the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Toussaint Louverture was born into slavery in Saint-Domingue and was nearly 50 when the revolution began, yet became its most prominent general.

Which Black designer, whose dresses the Smithsonian collects, made Jacqueline Kennedy's 1953 wedding gown?

Ann Lowe made the ivory silk taffeta gown and designed for generations of the Rockefeller, Roosevelt and Du Pont families.

Geoffrey Holder's costumes from which Broadway musical based on an L. Frank Baum novel are in the Smithsonian?

The Wiz retold The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with an all-Black cast and won seven Tony Awards in 1975, including Best Musical and one for Holder's costumes.

Relics of the São José, a Portuguese slave ship shown by the Smithsonian, were raised off the coast of which country?

South Africa's coast near Cape Town wrecked the ship in 1794 on its way from Mozambique to Brazil, and 212 of the captives aboard died.

A guard tower too big to install later, so the Smithsonian built around it, came from which notorious prison?

Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, sits on former slave plantations. Cranes lowered its 20-foot tower into place in 2013, before the museum's upper floors existed.

Which director made the film August 28 for the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture?

Ava DuVernay's 22-minute film dramatizes six events in Black history that fell on that date, with a cast including Lupita Nyong'o, Don Cheadle and Angela Bassett.

Which Top Chef alumna was named culinary ambassador for the Smithsonian's Sweet Home Café?

Carla Hall, who went on to co-host ABC's The Chew, took on public outreach for the 400-seat restaurant inside the African American history museum.

Which senator refused in 1994 to let a bill for a Smithsonian African American history museum reach the Senate floor?

Jesse Helms voiced fiscal and philosophical objections and stalled the bill despite its bipartisan support, so the museum waited nine more years for its law.

Which president named Mary McLeod Bethune to a 1929 commission for a memorial to African American achievement?

Herbert Hoover's commission planned a National Memorial Building, but Congress would not back it and private fundraising failed, so the idea stalled for decades.

Which New Orleans chef, the inspiration for Disney's Princess Tiana, has her red chef's coat in the Smithsonian?

Leah Chase, the Queen of Creole Cuisine, ran Dooky Chase's, a restaurant where civil rights activists gathered in the 1960s.

Which Detroit hip-hop producer's Akai MPC and Moog synthesizer did his mother donate to the Smithsonian?

J Dilla, born James Yancey, died at 32 in 2006, three days after the release of his album Donuts. His mother Maureen gave the instruments in 2014.

Robert Abbott's desk at the Smithsonian comes from which Black newspaper he founded in 1905?

Chicago Defender pages urged Black Southerners to settle in the North, helping to drive the Great Migration, and campaigned against Jim Crow-era violence.

Which jazz saxophonist played the custom King alto now in the Smithsonian from 1947 until his death in 1955?

Charlie Parker, known as Bird, had the King Super 20 custom-made in 1947 and played it for the last eight years of his life.

Which founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church used the money box held by the Smithsonian?

Richard Allen was born into slavery, bought his freedom and went on to found the first independent Black denomination in the United States.

Which abstract sculptor made Swing Low, the bronze hanging in the Smithsonian's African American history museum?

Richard Hunt made the 30-foot-wide work in 2016 as a tribute to the spiritual it is named for, and the Smithsonian owns twenty-one of his pieces.

Which Cosby Show star emceed the 2012 groundbreaking of the National Museum of African American History and Culture?

Phylicia Rashad, who played Clair Huxtable, hosted a ceremony that also featured music from Denyce Graves and the Heritage Signature Chorale.

The idea for a national African American museum began in 1915 with Black veterans of which war?

Civil War veterans of the Union Army, in Washington for a reunion and parade, formed a committee to build a memorial to Black achievement.

Visitors to the Smithsonian's African American history museum ride down to galleries that begin with which chapter?

The Middle Passage and slavery open the story at the lowest level, in a hallway intentionally designed to feel cramped and somewhat claustrophobic.

Which billionaire lent the Smithsonian copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment signed by Lincoln?

David Rubenstein, a Carlyle Group co-founder and Smithsonian regent, lent both rare documents for the opening and also gave the African American history museum $10 million.