In October 2017, hundreds of faculty, friends, and former students gathered at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to remember James Oliver “Jim” Horton. It was a fitting gathering place. As the museum’s director, Lonnie Bunch, commented, Jim’s legacy is everywhere at the museum, from the fact that several of his former doctoral students are now curators to the foundational commitment of the museum itself: that African American history is not a local branch of US history but integral to its core. Jim always insisted in his lectures and classes and on his many TV appearances and public engagements that “American history is African American history.”
The nearly fifty-year gap between the establishment of Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum (ACM) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) created a difference in the museums’ central narratives about Blackness and the inclusion of Afro-Latinidad. The Anacostia emerged in 1967 as part of the Black museum movement. It has historically framed Blackness as DC-based African Americanness with periodic inclusion of Afro-Latinidad. The first object in the collection of the NMAAHC is from Ecuador, signaling an inclusive representation of Black identities that foundationally includes Afro-Latinidad.
“A Fool’s errand”: Lonnie Bunch and the Creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture
