@maxkutner
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture was over a century in the making. In 1915, black Civil War veterans collected funds they later put toward creating a museum on the National Mall to celebrate African-American achievement. In 1929, President Calvin Coolidge signed Public Resolution 107, establishing a commission to plan its construction, but the project went nowhere. It took a renewed effort by lawmakers and African-American leaders beginning in the 1960s, and then decades of proposals before President George W. Bush signed legislation in 2003 authorizing the museum, which is set to open September 24.
Construction on the exterior of the building, a glass structure wrapped in a three-tiered bronzecolored scrim that’s meant to recall a motif in African sculpture, was completed in 2015. Curators are now filling the galleries with artifacts from a collection of some 34,000 items spanning centuries. Museum Director Lonnie Bunch says the exhaustive preparation is “really almost like planning a military exercise.”