Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Origins of the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum

In September of 1967, the Smithsonian Institution opened the first federally-funded community museum in the United States in the Southeast Washington, DC neighborhood of Anacostia. Initially envisioned by the Smithsonian as an experimental outreach effort to the local African American community in which the institution would simply display some of its collections that were otherwise already in its museums on the National Mall, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum’s founding staff and Neighborhood Advisory Committee rather quickly sought to transform the museum into a truly community-focused and community-engaged museum that would speak to local needs and interests as well as represent the history and culture of the community in which it was located. Opened in a former movie theatre in a working-class African American neighborhood across the Anacostia River from downtown Washington, DC, the museum began to transform traditional museum practices in ways that reflected the spirit of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in which its staff and constituents were active participants.

The Anacostia Neighborhood Museum’s founding director and several staff members had previously worked at the Southeast Neighborhood House, a longstanding settlement house that had been emboldened by -- and came to national attention in the midst of -- the tumult of the 1960s. Reinvigorated by an infusion of War on Poverty funds, the Southeast Neighborhood House engaged in tremendously successful tenant and youth organizing, neighborhood improvement, and education advocacy. That experience laid the groundwork for the early staff of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, along with longtime neighborhood residents, to draw on organizing strategies and Black Power ideologies to envision and shape this community museum. As the museum approaches its 50^th anniversary, this paper explores how the museum both shaped -- and was shaped by -- the 1960s, and thereby indelibly shaped the international community museum movement.