“Sustaining Black Neighborhoods and Black Communities:” Black History Museums in the Wake of Gentrification

Abstract

From the DuSable Museum in Chicago to cramped one-room shotgun house museums like the W.C. Handy Museum in Memphis, there are over 200 Black History and Culture Museums dedicated to affirming Black people and place in the United States, many having emerged as havens within Black neighborhoods. Most of these museums are in large metropolitan areas in predominantly Black neighborhoods where residents navigate high rates of unemployment, White flight, and violent police brutality. These museum spaces that materialized were often the work of years of efforts by Black community organizations. Critical to a Black sense of place, these museums are important sites of memory and community pushing back against anti-Blackness. Yet, many of the historically Black neighborhoods in which these museums are situated are undergoing rapid transformation. The violence of Black neighborhood erasure is commonplace and well documented. Based in Black Geographies, this paper seeks to answer the question posed by Andrea Burns at the end of her book From Storefront to Monument where she asks: “How should a museum respond if the original community surrounding the institution has changed or been displaced, as can occur through processes such as urban renewal, immigration, and gentrification?” (Burns 2013, 181). Based upon fieldwork conducted between 2019–2023, including museum site visits and semi-structured interviews with museum management at Black History Museums in Atlanta, Denver, Memphis, and Philadelphia, this paper explores the various ways in which Black History museums in gentrifying neighborhoods are responding.