Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History in the Black Power Era: The Washington Park Relocation

This paper will examine how the DuSable Museum of African American History negotiated with the City of Chicago and its Park District bureaucracy over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s to relocate into a larger facility in Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side. The museum’s move helped re-imagine a historically African American cultural space into the city’s geography, a process that was certainly part of the increased engagements of Black Power activists around the country with civic-level politics and urban coalition-building. Since its founding in 1961 and especially by the end of that decade, the home-based museum founded by Margaret and Charles Burroughs was having trouble accommodating its growing program of activities which included tour groups, curatorial exhibits from Africa, archival collections, and popular educational functions such as regular Black history classes and lectures. Washington Park appeared to be a natural site for relocation since it had long been a major staging ground for African American cultural celebrations on the South Side of Chicago.

However, the museum’s directors faced a difficult negotiation with civic officials who acted slowly in their response to early proposals for relocation. To gain momentum, the museum’s directors reached out to local African American business leaders and professional historians, as well as white directors of foundations and other Chicago area museums to enlist further support for the DuSable’s growth. This process of “museum-making” offered a valuable blueprint to other people of color (particularly Chicago’s burgeoning Hispanic and Latino communities) for how urban public space could be transformed through efforts that promoted public history. The coalition of interests involved with the museum’s relocation also demonstrated how battles over the parameters of African American cultural politics during the Black Power era can be considered through the evolution of museum practices.