The Charles H. Wright Museum Set the Template for Narrating the African-American Experience

America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States.

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man contains a scene in which the narrator arrives at the Liberty Paints plant and is shown how to mix “Optic White,” supposedly the purest white paint shade that can be found on the market. In order to make this whitest of white pigments, a plant supervisor demonstrates that 10 drops of a black chemical must go into each batch of a milky brown solution. The vigorous stirring of the black compound into the mixture ultimately yields a white that is pristine. In this way, Ellison analogizes the argument that in the United States of America, while whiteness is dominant within the culture’s spectrum of ethnic and cultural hues, it includes, in its very makeup, blackness, that is to say, the combination of all other colors. While the color white constitutes a negation of all this rich, colorful exuberance, Ellison has extended the metaphor to suggest that whiteness also absorbs and hides the labor of African-derived people, their cultural practices, and the lifeways they have developed. Centuries of the transformative presence of Black people in the US and their enslaved, indentured, or free market labor has often been rendered invisible, while a political ideology widely regarded as “patriotism” that is putatively premised on freedom, self-determination, personal satisfaction, and an enduring concern for justice has come to describe the predominant American story. But when the full and honest American story is told, it is the presence of African Americans that has made the promise contained in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence come to life — that we all have a natural and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

The experience of African Americans is integral to the story of the United States — its triumphs, its charms, its profound failures and inequities, and even its enduring potential. In the words of Neil Barclay, the current director and chief executive officer of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, “Black history really [is] American history because if you think about what is essential about American history, it is it civil rights struggles, the women’s suffrage movement, Black music such as Motown and electronica.” The fundamental mission of the museum that he leads is to make the intertwining of these histories visible and comprehensible. He explains, “At its essence it’s about making people understand how critical Black people have been in this country [and] to the world.”

The Charles H. Wright Museum, from its inception in 1965, took up the responsibility of telling this story well and fully. To do so, it has presented a core exhibition in various iterations since its opening. The exhibition was originally titled O the People: The African American Experience. It encompassed 16,000 square feet and covered over 400 years of African and African American history. In 2000, conversations about updating the exhibition began and about four years later a new version was unveiled, And Still We Rise. This current iteration consists of a chronological narrative retelling of the journey of African people to the Americas, essentially the path by which Africans became African American. 

This installation is humanity’s origin story. It begins on the African continent. Ranging from modern-day Morocco to South Africa, it includes illustrations of the ecology, geological landscape, and the various political contexts. Here, the exhibit argues that every member of the Homo sapiens species is descended from a genealogical “Eve” who existed in prehistorical Africa. The journey continues, outlining the development of major African civilizations (with particular attention paid to the kingdom of Benin, a highly organized city-state from the 13th through the 19th century), as well as encounters with people from other parts of world, the evolution of diverse economies, and the onset of the transatlantic slave trade, where the story takes a decisive turn. 

A part of the exhibition titled The Door of No Return conveys the experience of enslaved people who were captured in wars or raids by African allies of European traders. These captives, mostly from West and Central Africa, were incarcerated and sold to traders who thereafter took them via ship across the Atlantic Ocean to America’s 13 colonies, as well as the Caribbean and South America, to be sold as property. This section is designed to look like a ship’s hold. Mannequins are shackled together and stacked head to toe within wooden shelves in the simulated belly of a cargo ship. (Some of these ships could carry as many as 700 people at a time, not including the crew.) The display gives an inkling of the dire conditions of the hold, which typically had little air flow and hardly any sanitation. Moans and cries of pain audible within the display express a sense of hopelessness, as does the dim, intermittent lighting. The exhibit, meant to illustrate the Middle Passage, is harrowing in its bleakness. George Hamilton, chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees, discusses his initial interaction with it: “To experience the Door of No Return and the slave ship was very emotional for me, but then to continue through the exhibit, and again, to see visual examples, of the history that I had heard, over the years, and been taught really spoke to me about the resiliency of our people.”

Rumia Ambrose Burbank, who has served as a board trustee for seven years and is currently a member of its Executive Committee, describes her own experience of the core exhibition at 10 years old: “I remember I had no idea what to expect. We were told that some parts were going to be hard as we walked through. [I had] so many different emotions, from joy to sadness, to anger. I was experiencing all these things, and at the end I was just overwhelmed.”

These poignant responses notwithstanding, this section of the core exhibition is not merely meant to emotionally enthrall visitors and move them to tears. It is intended to communicate verifiable historical truths. Through its telling of this story, first-person institutions (organizations that adopt the first-person perspective and communicate with audiences from this perspective) such as the Wright assert that the lived experience of a culture is a primary criterion in detailing the key elements of the history of African American history in the nation. Hamilton also understands the importance of historical exactness, especially as the Wright Museum competes with historical fictions being told elsewhere in culture. 

“With the number of stories told that are inaccurate, that are out-and-out lies, untruths, it’s really important for us [to be] historically accurate — not to build our stories that we share with society based on folklore, but really to be accurate in what we tell,” he says. 

According to Hamilton, the museum has been carefully mindful to base the displays of the core exhibition on properly conducted research carried out on the African West Coast ports where key points of contact within the slave trade historically took place. He continues, “Specific to the core exhibit, when we recently visited the slave dungeons in West Africa, [we saw] how closely modeled the section which depicts the Door of No Return and the holding cells, replicated that experience from Ghana.”

It is imperative that the museum get the history right because, like Ralph Ellison’s protagonist, African Americans are constantly under the threat of being rendered invisible in the US, even though they were present at the start of its story. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database relates that between 1525 and 1866, the duration of the slave trade, about 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World, while only 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage, with about 388,000 disembarking in North America (the remaining people went to the Caribbean and South America). In light of this history, it’s unsurprising that their descendants have been highly concerned with governmental policies regarding who is seen and recognized, who is valued, in what ways they are valued, and what myths have been developed in order to keep that recognition and valuation at bay. 

Barbara K. Smith, stepdaughter of the museum’s founder, Charles H. Wright, by way of Wright’s second marriage, says that as a child she was told certain myths about Black people — and they are precisely the stories that Dr. Wright sought to discredit: “They said that slaves were taken care of and were happy, and I learned that was the biggest lie ever.” This crucial falsity makes the subtle but pernicious allegation that African Americans have been treated by the White majority better than they’ve claimed, that they are much better off than others who have been subjected to similar circumstances, that they invent stories to cover up their own shortcomings, that they are not to be believed. At its heart and soul, the work of the Charles H. Wright Museum may be to create a story so grounded in truth and insight that it compels belief. 

Leaving the Door of No Return, visitors emerge into a recreation of the dire circumstances of forced labor and capricious and unpredictable violence to which African Americans were subject. Then the story moves through various key historical epochs: the Civil War, Reconstruction, World War II, the development of the middle class, the Civil Rights movement, the evolution of various inventions by Black people that have become part of mainstream culture; musical genres, politics, social movements, fashion, and the culinary arts. The core exhibition shows how the presence of African Americans has consistently inflected and shaped the larger American story, by forcing the majority to reckon with the real-world implications of committing to the credo “all men are created equal.” However, in its initial conception, the founder envisioned the museum as a space to celebrate Black people and their trans-African cultures.

Wright imagined the museum as a kind of institutional spinal column for the collective African-American body, one that would keep it upright despite profound countervailing pressures to dehumanize it. An obstetrician and gynecologist operating in Detroit in the 1950s, Dr. Wright developed a thriving medical practice alongside his deep interest in the history of Black culture both in Africa and the country of his residence. This interest was invigorated by his trips to the west coast of Africa to take medical surveys from 1964 to ’65. During his travels, he purchased artifacts that formed the center of what would become his museum. According to Smith, the doctor recruited some of his clientele to the cause of understanding the history that would eventually become the core exhibition.

“My dad would examine women [and] would talk to them about the museum. He would quiz them on an examining table,” she recalls. “He ended up recruiting a lot of the women volunteers, who were his patients. He was already collecting artifacts from trips to Africa and showing them what he had added to his collection, and that’s all he talked about. They were the ones that actually raised the money for, I should say, a real museum. The museum was in his home, and he wanted a second one, and those [women] became his ardent, devoted fundraisers.”

Wright eventually inaugurated the International Afro-American Museum (IAM) in 1965. Upon its opening in January 1966, the museum displayed collections of African art and instruments, along with an exhibit of inventions by African Americans, and documentation that pertained to Civil Rights activists. These were all organized and developed to give African Americans some sense of rightly belonging to the culture in which they found themselves, one that systematically treated them as not truly belonging. Yet, nothing could be more American than a social and political consciousness that regards rights as not merely things that are bestowed, but rather entitlements that must be fought for to be realized — a key aspect of this nation’s story that African Americans have cultivated through their resilient presence. Rumia Burbank expands on this:

“I know people want to move forward, but you can’t really move forward until you understand the past and how we got to where we are […]. Corporations, what’s your responsibility to making sure that you’re doing the right things with your employees? It’s broader than just, “Is it the right thing to do?” There’s a social consciousness that has awakened and we have the perfect opportunity to be a part of that educational piece. Especially now, since books are being taken out of classrooms, things are happening that make it tougher for us to tell our story. Institutions like this are critical to ensuring that the stories get told.”

Burbank’s contention is that United States history in general, but particularly accounts of the experience of African Americans, provide the foundations for future action. The testimonies of African Americans should empower all who come to know these histories by obliging them to read the past through a social justice lens. But not everyone will feel empowered by this viewpoint. 

This story incriminates whiteness as one of the nation’s central problems, one of the decisive elements of US culture and history that prevents the country from fully blossoming into the democratic ideal it claims in its founding documents. Whiteness must not be conflated with those who are racialized as White. Whiteness is an ideology, a world view that despises the body in favor of some imagined purity, is terrified of difference, and requires a subordinate class for its adherents to feel that the world is operating as it should, and therefore it is hostile to any appearance of social justice. 

“Only the African American narrative really delineates how white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy is literally designed for our oppression and oftentimes death,” says Kelli Morgan, a former senior curator and past interim vice president of exhibitions and programs. “You ain’t going to get that story — straight, no chaser — no other place.”

In certain parts of the country, it is still considered controversial or even intolerable to acknowledge the nation’s deep ties to a white supremacist ideology, the ideology at the root of the chattel slavery system, the ideology that birthed racialized segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, and a raft of social and political policies that essentially criminalized and penalized the state of being that is Black personhood. These penalties also impinge on the institutions that have sprung up to tell a truer story than that which the ideology of whiteness aims to convey about the origins of the United States of America.

Around the country, arts and cultural organizations that tell stories other than the majoritarian, mainstream one of the nation’s development — which is sometimes inflected by whiteness — have been perennially under-resourced. They offer difficult and more complex narratives. The Charles H. Wright Museum is one such institution and because of these factors, among others, has gone through several years of financial uncertainty (other cultural institutions have also experienced this given the municipality’s economic instability). This constant anxiety about surviving makes the museum itself a representation of that African-American resilience and the imaginative capacities that shine under duress. 

“If you’ve only worked in global majority institutions, a lot of your work is dealt with from a position of scarcity, trying to make things work,” Barclay explains. “And if you worked a lot in historically White institutions (and I have worked in both), you realize that more often than not they don’t think about their work by assuming it will not have all of the resources necessary to realize their efforts in the way they envision them. To be sure, it is not as cut and dry as that, but basically global majority institutions are comparatively under-resourced and have been forever and our work can often reflect that scarcity.”

He continues: “It’s not lack of intelligence. It’s not lack of innovation or skill in any way. It’s that we have never been given the kind of money and the ability to mentor and train people that are required in BIPOC organizations the way our cultural counterparts have. A lot of money in the museum world has been spent diversifying White institutions by bringing curators of color into those institutions. Where these efforts have failed is because those institutions fundamentally do not share the same perspective as their BIPOC peers on the work being presented. The lived experience of our history fundamentally informs the way we frame our stories. Notably, these efforts happened at a time when BIPOC organizations were in dire need of curatorial talent of their own.”

Barclay argues that until very recently there has been a lack of financial and professional infrastructure for the necessary storytelling work to be done at a level that matches the talents and ambitions in organizations like the Wright. Again, the underlying issue has to do with being seen, and being esteemed as worthy of sustained, public investment by the municipality, private funders, and philanthropic institutions. Around the nation, cultural organizations, theaters, museums, and project spaces that focus on the stories of these underserved populations echo the struggle to be regarded as coequal and essential partners in the articulation of the larger American story. 

Yet, even when a story’s importance is appreciated, at times the needs of the whole organization are not recognized. For the Charles H. Wright Museum, this has meant that the physical infrastructure required to do their work has often been ignored. Jeffrey Anderson, the museum’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, talks about the very basic needs that had gone unrecognized for years because of a lack of funds dedicated to the staff and building, which was constructed in 1997.

“Over this last four and a half years we have probably spent between $15 to $20 million in capital improvements and we still have a lot to do, and that’s only because the available resources were on programs and exhibitions, which is our core mission — which it should be — but you still have to figure out a balance of continually investing to maintain the facility,” he says. “Most funders are only interested in programs, exhibitions, children’s programming, and they forget that all those things have to exist in a space and that space has to be maintained.”

More than a museum, the Charles H. Wright serves as a kind of community center. Each July, it hosts an annual African World Festival; the Friends Committee organizes a Martin Luther King Day breakfast to honor members of the community; and it has held public programs with Black luminaries including the poet Nikki Giovanni, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, and New York Times opinion columnist Charles Blow. When the renowned singer, and Detroit native, Aretha Franklin died in 2018, the museum hosted two days of public viewing at the museum to allow mourners to pay their final respects to her. 

“We need to have this building,” says Walter Bailey, a volunteer member of the Friends Committee and the Community Committee, affirming the key role the structure plays as a gathering space. “We need to have what it is here. We need to have its purpose. We need to have its goals. We need to improve some of the visionary sites that it’s looking to reach for. Our dedication to this building is the ongoing saga of African American folk in the middle of adversity finding ways to move forward.”

Morgan describes the museum as a place for “the preservation and the celebration of African American arts and culture.” She goes on, “It is the space for all things Black. You can come and have your wedding, your family reunion. But then you can also see Malcolm X’s letters.”

The improvements made over the past few years are meant to sustain this space. They were made possible through multimillion-dollar grants from the Ford Foundation in 2020, Mackenzie Scott in 2021, and the Ralph Wilson Foundation’s commitment to a 10-year, $300,000-per-year grant to the museum, also made in 2021. In addition, the Wright is partnering with the Detroit Historical Society to pursue a millage and was just last year granted transitional funding from the State of Michigan to help the institutions operate until a millage is obtained. Through transitional funding the Wright was awarded $6 million in 2022 and $4.8 million in 2023, the vast majority of which (approximately $7.5 million) went to addressing its deferred maintenance. Even with these investments, the question remains as to how long-term financial stability can be achieved so that the museum thrives instead of merely surviving. 

For much of its almost 60-year history, the Wright was the largest museum dedicated to African-American history in the country — until it assisted a new museum in telling that narrative. When the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), part of the Smithsonian Institution, was established in 2003 and opened in 2016 on the National Mall in Washington, DC, it became the largest such institution. The Wright served as a template for it. Anderson says, “I know that when the museum in DC was being built, they met with people here at the Wright on how to do it.” The Wright has been a model for the creation of other institutions, including the NMAAHC. From its beginning in Dr. Wright’s basement, the museum has cultivated increased visibility for all African Americans by showing other institutions how to build their own storytelling apparatuses. Now there is an even wider aperture through which Black people may be seen.

In March of 2024, the museum presented the temporary exhibition Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design. It featured the Academy Award-winning designer’s ensembles for several acclaimed films, including Malcolm X, Amistad, and Black Panther. This show is a continuation of the tale begun by O the People, in it demonstrating pervasive visibility and popularity of African-American artists by way of the compelling cultural, historical, and political stories told through film. Even as the United States still struggles to integrate African Americans, to acknowledge how transformative their presence has been since the nation’s inception, through their creative leadership they’ve continued to make this country one of the most successful multiethnic, multicultural societies on the globe. Like those displays of Ruth E. Carter’s clothing that await other people to make them even more radiant, colorful, and full of promise, the Charles H. Wright Museum welcomes African Americans to see that they are among the principals of this profoundly American story.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.