AMERICA AT 250 - The Promise Series: The Promise Remembered - Who Gets to Tell America's Story?

The National Museum of African American History and Culture at 10

By DJTen | RadioActive1 WBOB | September 24, 2026

On September 24, 2016, a new building opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

But what opened that day was more than a museum.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture represented the culmination of a struggle that had begun more than a century earlier—a struggle not simply to preserve Black history, but to establish that African American history belongs at the center of the American story.

Ten years later, as the United States commemorates its 250th anniversary, that mission carries renewed significance.

Because beneath every exhibit, artifact and photograph is a larger question:

Who gets to tell America’s story?

And perhaps just as importantly:

What happens to the American promise when parts of that story are forgotten, minimized or removed?

A Museum More Than a Century in the Making

The idea did not begin in 2003 when Congress finally authorized the museum.

It began generations earlier.

In 1915, African American veterans and civic leaders organized what became the National Memorial Association, seeking a permanent national memorial recognizing Black contributions to the United States. The effort grew out of the experiences of Black Civil War veterans who had fought to preserve the Union yet still struggled to have their service fully recognized.

The idea survived decades of stalled legislation, changing proposals and political obstacles.

Then, in December 2003, President George W. Bush signed legislation establishing the National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of the Smithsonian Institution. Lonnie G. Bunch III was named its founding director in 2005. The museum site beside the Washington Monument was selected in 2006, ground was broken in 2012, and the museum finally opened on September 24, 2016.

What took more than a century to build was never merely a repository for objects.

It was an argument about belonging.

A People’s Journey, A Nation’s Story

The museum’s guiding idea is captured in six words:

“A People’s Journey, A Nation’s Story.”

That distinction matters.

The museum does not present African American history as a separate chapter running alongside American history. It presents the African American experience as one of the forces that shaped the nation itself.

Slavery is American history.

Reconstruction is American history.

Jim Crow is American history.

The Great Migration, jazz, gospel, the blues, military service, the Civil Rights Movement, Black entrepreneurship, literature, science, sports, politics and popular culture are all American history.

That is why the museum moves visitors through more than triumph.

There is bondage and freedom.

Segregation and resistance.

Exclusion and achievement.

Pain and celebration.

The story does not begin with what African Americans contributed to America.

It begins with the recognition that African Americans helped make America.

Today the museum holds more than 45,000 artifacts and, since opening, has welcomed 13.8 million visitors in person, according to the Smithsonian.

Those numbers tell us something important.

People are still coming to understand the country through the evidence of the people who lived its history.

When Objects Become Witnesses

One of the great strengths of the museum is that history is not presented only through interpretation.

The objects themselves testify.

Harriet Tubman’s hymnal.

Joseph Trammell’s freedom papers.

A Tuskegee Airmen training aircraft.

A Jim Crow railroad car.

A guard tower from Louisiana’s Angola prison.

The museum also preserves fragments connected to the São José, a Portuguese slave ship that sank in 1794 while carrying enslaved Africans.

These objects cannot explain themselves.

But neither can they easily be dismissed.

They place physical evidence beside the written record.

They remind us that history happened to actual people—in homes, churches, courtrooms, battlefields, schools, prisons, buses and voting booths.

Museums preserve those witnesses after the people themselves are gone.

That makes preservation more than an academic exercise.

It becomes an act of public memory.

Lonnie Bunch and the Work of Building Memory

Few people are more closely connected to that work than historian Lonnie G. Bunch III.

Bunch became the museum’s founding director in 2005 when there was no building, no substantial collection and no established institution waiting for him.

Under his leadership, the museum secured $250 million from Congress and raised another $500 million from private supporters. He helped assemble the curatorial team, guide the architectural competition, build the collection and shepherd the institution toward its 2016 opening.

In 2019, Bunch became Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution—the first African American and the first historian to hold that position. He announced this month that he will retire after nearly 38 years of Smithsonian service.

His departure happens at an unusually consequential moment.

The museum he helped create is celebrating ten years at the same time the country is debating how its history should be presented in federal cultural institutions.

America at 250 — and the Battle Over Memory

That debate is not theoretical.

In July 2026, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14416, expanding an administration review of the Smithsonian. The order followed a 2025 directive and stated that Smithsonian presentations had too often emphasized what the administration described as divisive or ideologically driven interpretations of American history.

The administration says its goal is to restore what it describes as a more unifying presentation of the nation’s heritage.

Critics of that approach have raised a different concern: that government efforts to define what constitutes an appropriately celebratory version of American history could place pressure on museums to minimize slavery, segregation, racial violence and other parts of the national record.

Those are competing interpretations of what national institutions should do.

But there is a more fundamental point worth considering.

History is not the same thing as condemnation.

To document slavery is not to say that slavery is the only thing America ever was.

To explain segregation is not to deny American progress.

To teach racial violence does not erase the people who fought against it.

And to acknowledge contradictions within the American experiment does not require abandoning the experiment itself.

In many ways, those contradictions are precisely what make the American story worth examining.

The Promise Requires a Record

This is where the National Museum of African American History and Culture fits within our America at 250 — The Promise Series.

Throughout this series we have returned to the promises contained in the nation’s founding ideals:

Liberty.

Equality.

Citizenship.

Justice.

Self-government.

But a promise can only be evaluated when there is a record against which to measure it.

Frederick Douglass understood that.

Ida B. Wells understood it.

The soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts understood it.

Fannie Lou Hamer understood it.

The Little Rock Nine understood it.

So did generations of people whose names never appeared in history books but whose lives revealed the distance between what America promised and what America practiced.

That distance is not evidence that the promise was meaningless.

It is evidence that the promise was unfinished.

Welcome Home

For its tenth anniversary, the museum has chosen the theme:

“Welcome Home: Our Legacy Continues.”

The celebration, called The Reunion, runs September 24 through 27 and includes museum programs, public conversations and community events. One program will bring Lonnie Bunch back to the museum for a discussion examining how museums help Americans understand the past and consider multiple perspectives.

Another event reaches even farther back.

The museum’s Purple Ball will commemorate the Pearl, the schooner on which 77 enslaved people attempted to escape Washington in 1848—one of the largest attempted escapes from slavery in American history.

That connection is fitting.

A museum dedicated to preserving memory is celebrating its future by remembering people who once risked everything for the freedom America said belonged to humanity.

The Promise Remembered

Ten years after the doors opened, perhaps the museum’s greatest accomplishment cannot be measured by attendance, artifacts or square footage.

Its greatest accomplishment may be that the institution exists at all.

For generations, African Americans asked the country to recognize that their experiences were worthy of preservation.

They asked for their soldiers to be remembered.

Their families to be remembered.

Their suffering to be remembered.

Their creativity to be remembered.

Their resistance to be remembered.

Their achievements to be remembered.

And eventually, on some of the most symbolically important ground in the United States, the country built a national institution dedicated to doing exactly that.

The museum therefore represents something larger than Black history.

It represents the idea that a democracy must be willing to remember itself completely.

Not selectively.

Not comfortably.

Completely.

Because preserving the difficult chapters does not diminish the American story.

It makes the story whole.

And as America enters its next 250 years, that may be one of the most important promises of all:

That every generation inherits not only the nation’s ideals, but the responsibility to remember how well we lived up to them.

A promise cannot be measured if we erase the distance between what was promised and what actually happened.

America at 250 — The Promise Series

The promise remembered. The story preserved. The work continues.