California African American Museum

This guide to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles opens in nineteen seventy seven, when the state chartered a museum that owned exactly one object, a bronze bust of educator and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune, and spent four years borrowing rooms before it had walls of its own. It follows the museum to its home in Exposition Park, designed by two Black architects, Jack Haywood and Vincent Proby, and to its opening in July nineteen eighty four with an exhibition on Black Olympians curated by a young historian named Lonnie Bunch, who went on to found the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.