Northwest African American Museum

This guide to the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle opens with a discrepancy in the museum's own timeline, between the twenty-five years it likes to cite and the twenty-seven it actually took to open, and asks what filled the missing gap. The answer starts in November 1985, when about forty activists broke into the shuttered Colman School, once the Central District's elementary school for generations of Black, Chinese, Japanese and Filipino children. Four of them, Charlie James, Earl Debnam, Michael Greenwood and Omari Tahir-Garrett, stayed behind with no heat or water, patrolling the halls and building their own exhibits inside the empty classrooms.