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Plan for African American museum approved
By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer
Charleston’s proposed International African American Museum, which has been in the making for the past five years, is beginning to take shape.
Last month, the museum’s board gave the nod to a 145-page strategic plan outlining the museum’s size, content, mission and fundraising goals.
The plan estimates the roughly 60,000-square-foot museum will cost more than $69 million. Private donations plus state and federal funding most likely will be the means to financially fuel the museum, slated to be built at the end of Calhoun Street in a vacant lot across from the South Carolina Aquarium.
“We need to lay out a fundraising plan with the help of a consultant,” said Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who is credited with conceiving the idea for the museum and is a museum board member.
State Sen. Darrell Jackson, D-Hopkins, another board member, said he is confident the state will approve $500,000 for the museum.
When the museum will be built is difficult to determine, said board member Michael Allen of the National Parks Service. Architects and contractors have yet to be chosen for the museum’s design and construction. The board is considering either issuing bids or interviewing prospective architects and general contractors.
“It might be 2009 or 2010 before the museum opens, but the important thing is to build it right,” Allen said.
The museum is to be a place where Charleston-area residents and visitors can learn how even as slaves Africans and their descendants helped shape “different eras of economic, political and cultural developments across the globe, as seen through the lens of South Carolina,” according to the plan.
Ticket prices will be $8 for adults and $4 for children.
The plan projects that the museum has the potential to attract 110,000 visitors during a “high-stable” year, which the plan puts at the museum’s fourth year of operation, when initial excitement generated by the museum subsides and attendance is driven by marketing and exhibit choices.
That figure would make the museum Charleston’s seventh-largest attraction in terms of attendance, according to the projections. Based on 2004 attendance figures, the International African American Museum would trail the Charleston Museum, which drew 113,200 visitors; Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, which drew 135,000; Charles Towne Landing and State Historic Site, which drew 145,000; Fort Sumter, which attracted 189,000; Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum, which attracted 298,045; and the South Carolina Aquarium, which drew 439,123.
The museum is expected to attract visitors within a 60-mile radius of Charleston, according to the plan’s projections. The goal is to strengthen the Lowcountry’s tourism economy by encouraging tourists to visit black historical sites and other regional attractions and to boost Charleston’s black-owned, tourism-related businesses.
Galleries and exhibits
The International African American Museum’s plan calls for three core exhibits: “Africans Shape the Rural Lowcountry,” “African Cities on the Carolina Coast” and “Defining Freedom by Their Action,” an exhibit covering black South Carolinians’ struggle for freedom during the century following emancipation.
The museum will emphasize Charleston’s significance as a major port for Africans arriving in America, the continuing evidence of African influences in South Carolina and the “ongoing global and local struggle for human dignity.”
Additionally, the museum will include several exhibits that change every eight months, a learning center, a theater and public gathering spaces.
The board intends Charleston’s museum to take its place among the nation’s other prominent black historical museums, such as Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the Museum of African American History in Detroit, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama, Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.
What will make the International African American Museum unique is its focus on Charleston as the predominant port where African slaves entered the United States, according to the museum’s board.
Among the board’s remaining tasks are establishing the museum’s nonprofit status and conducting a feasibility study, said Gretta Middleton, the museum’s director.
Dennis Quick covers hospitality and tourism for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.
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