National Museum of African American History and Culture
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40 free National Museum of African American History and Culture trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture took most of a century to arrive. The first call for a national memorial to Black achievement came in the 1910s, bill after bill died in Congress, and the doors finally opened on the National Mall in 2016. It quickly became one of the toughest tickets in American culture. This quiz walks through the story the way a visitor does. There are questions on the campaign in Congress, the architects and the meaning behind the building's tiered shape and patterned metal skin, and above all the objects: a rock and roll star's convertible, a funk band's spaceship, a casket that changed a nation, a shawl sent by a monarch. It suits anyone planning a visit, teachers building a Black History Month lesson, and trivia hosts who want a round with real stories behind every answer. Each question comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing more than you came with.
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Q 01Which president rang a church bell to open the National Museum of African American History and Culture?
Barack Obama
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.
Q 02Which talk show host has a 350-seat theater named for her at the Smithsonian's African American history museum?
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey gave the museum $21 million in all, the largest gift it had received by the time its doors opened.
Q 03Whose glass-topped casket, kept open at his 1955 funeral, is preserved by the Smithsonian?
Emmett Till
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.
Q 04Which British monarch gave Harriet Tubman the shawl held by the Smithsonian's African American history museum?
Queen Victoria
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.
Q 05Which rock and roll star's red Cadillac convertible sits in the Smithsonian's African American history museum?
Chuck Berry
Chuck Berry owned the cherry-red Cadillac. He was among the first musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986.
Q 06Black World War II airmen who trained in the Smithsonian's Stearman biplane were educated at which Alabama institute?
Tuskegee
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.
Q 07The Smithsonian's African American history museum shows which president before a wall naming people he enslaved?
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Q 08Which funk bandleader's Mothership stage prop landed in the National Museum of African American History and Culture?
George Clinton
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.
Q 09On the day of her 1955 arrest in Montgomery, which activist was sewing a dress that the Smithsonian holds?
Rosa Parks
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.
Q 10Which NBA star's uniform from the 2008 Finals is in the Smithsonian's African American history museum?
Kobe Bryant
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.
Q 11The National Museum of African American History and Culture stands on land carved from which landmark's grounds?
Washington Monument
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.
Q 12Which founding director of the Smithsonian's African American history museum went on to lead the whole Smithsonian?
Lonnie Bunch
Lonnie Bunch ran the museum from 2005 to 2019, then became the first African American and the first historian to head the Smithsonian Institution.
Q 13Which architect, knighted in 2017, was lead designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture?
David Adjaye
Q 21Which leader of an 1831 Virginia slave rebellion owned the small Bible given to the Smithsonian in 2012?
Nat Turner
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.
Q 22A letter by which leader of the Haitian Revolution is held by the Smithsonian's African American history museum?
Toussaint Louverture
Toussaint Louverture was born into slavery in Saint-Domingue and was nearly 50 when the revolution began, yet became its most prominent general.
Q 23Which Black designer, whose dresses the Smithsonian collects, made Jacqueline Kennedy's 1953 wedding gown?
Ann Lowe
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.
Q 14Which West African people's crowns inspired the tiered shape of the Smithsonian's African American history museum?
Yoruba
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.
Q 15The Smithsonian's African American history museum copies ironwork from New Orleans and which other Southern city?
Charleston
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.
Q 16The bronze-look panels on the Smithsonian's African American history museum are really made of which metal?
Aluminum
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.
Q 17Which civil rights veteran in Congress pushed bills for a Smithsonian African American history museum from 1988?
John Lewis
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.
Q 18Which NBA star gave $2.5 million to back the Smithsonian's exhibit on boxer Muhammad Ali?
LeBron James
LeBron James made the gift in November 2016, two months after the museum opened, to support its display on Ali's accomplishments.
Q 19Which New Orleans-born jazz star owned the Selmer trumpet in the Smithsonian's African American history museum?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong, the trumpeter and singer, was nicknamed Satchmo, a shortening of Satchelmouth.
Q 20Which gymnast's equipment from the 2012 Olympics, where she won the all-around gold, is held by the Smithsonian?
Gabby Douglas
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.
Ann Lowe made the ivory silk taffeta gown and designed for generations of the Rockefeller, Roosevelt and Du Pont families.
Q 24Geoffrey Holder's costumes from which Broadway musical based on an L. Frank Baum novel are in the Smithsonian?
The Wiz
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.
Q 25Relics of the São José, a Portuguese slave ship shown by the Smithsonian, were raised off the coast of which country?
South Africa
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.
Q 26A guard tower too big to install later, so the Smithsonian built around it, came from which notorious prison?
Angola
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.
Q 27Which director made the film August 28 for the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture?
Ava DuVernay
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.
Q 28Which Top Chef alumna was named culinary ambassador for the Smithsonian's Sweet Home Café?
Carla Hall
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.
Q 29Which senator refused in 1994 to let a bill for a Smithsonian African American history museum reach the Senate floor?
Jesse Helms
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.
Q 30Which president named Mary McLeod Bethune to a 1929 commission for a memorial to African American achievement?
Herbert Hoover
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.