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The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum is a wax museum in Baltimore, Maryland featuring prominent African-American and other black historical figures. It was established in 1983, in a downtown storefront on Saratoga Street. [1] The museum is at 1601 East North Avenue in a renovated firehouse, a Victorian Mansion, and two former apartment dwellings that provide nearly 30,000 square feet (3,000 m2) of exhibit and office space. The exhibits feature over 100 wax figures and scenes, including: a full model slave ship exhibit which portrays the 400-year history of the Atlantic Slave Trade, an exhibit on the role of youth in making history, and a Maryland room highlighting the contributions to African American history by notable Marylanders. [2] The museum's co-founder, Dr. Joanne Martin, describes the importance of preserving Black history in this way, stating: 'everything else, it seems like a movie if you don't have a sense of exactly what people were fighting against.' [3]
The National Great Blacks in Wax museum is Baltimore's first wax museum and the first wax museum of African American history in the nation. The museum was started as a grassroots operation by Dr. Elmer Martin and his wife Dr. Joanne Martin. [4]
The idea of blacks in wax started with a few wax figures that were taken around to various schools, community centers, and malls. The museum was originally sponsored exclusively by Dr. Elmer Martin, his wife Dr. Joanne Martin, and donations from the community. In the early days, Dr. Elmer Martin was forced to ask his wife to sell her wedding ring to keep the moving exhibit going. However, it received national recognition in 1983 when the founding members were allotted grants, loans, and endowments to open a permanent exhibition. In 1988, Blacks in Wax received its permanent home on the 1600 block of North Avenue in the neighborhood of Oliver.
The site was originally home to a firehouse that was converted into a showhouse. In 2004, The Blacks in Wax Museum was recognized by the U.S. Congress as the "Nation's first wax museum presenting the history of great Black Americans" and subsequently became The National Blacks in Wax Museum. [5]
The following people have been depicted at the museum:
William Still was an African-American abolitionist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a conductor of the Underground Railroad and was responsible for aiding and assisting at least 649 slaves to freedom towards North. Still was also a businessman, writer, historian and civil rights activist. Before the American Civil War, Still was chairman of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, named the Vigilant Association of Philadelphia. He directly aided fugitive slaves and also kept records of the people served in order to help families reunite.
Reginald Frances Lewis, was an American businessman. He was one of the richest Black American men in the 1980s, and the first African-American to build a billion-dollar company: TLC Beatrice International Holdings Inc.
The Maryland Zoo — also known as The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore and formerly known as The Baltimore City Zoo or the Baltimore Zoo — is a 135-acre park located in historic Druid Hill Park in the northwestern area of the City of Baltimore, Maryland, with the postal address of 1876 Mansion House Drive. Druid Hill was opened in 1876 as the first major park purchase by the City under foreseeing Mayor Thomas Swann (1809-1883), and was later designed by famed nationally-known landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903).
Claribel Cone (1864–1929) and Etta Cone (1870–1949), collectively known as the Cone sisters, were active as American art collectors and socialites during the first part of the 20th century. Claribel trained as a physician and Etta as a pianist. Their social circle included Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. They gathered one of the best known private collections of modern art in the United States at their Baltimore apartments, and the collection now makes up a wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their collection was estimated to be worth almost a billion US dollars in 2002.
Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards was a non-profit sports museum in Baltimore, Maryland. The museum is owned and operated by the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum. It opened on May 14, 2005, with Julia Ruth Stevens, the daughter of celebrated baseball player Babe Ruth, in attendance. The 22,000-square-foot (2,044 m2) museum, housed in the former Camden Station, was adjacent to the main gate of Oriole Park at Camden Yards and had artifacts and interactive exhibits profiling Maryland's sports history. Exhibits included such area teams as the Baltimore Orioles, Baltimore Ravens, Baltimore Colts, Maryland Terrapins, Baltimore Elite Giants, Baltimore Black Sox, and the Baltimore Blast.
Nat Turner's Rebellion, historically known as the Southampton Insurrection, was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Led by Nat Turner, the rebels, made up of enslaved African Americans, killed between 55 and 65 White people, making it the deadliest slave revolt for the latter racial group in U.S. history. The rebellion was effectively suppressed within a few days, at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, but Turner survived in hiding for more than 30 days afterward.
The Baltimore Museum of Industry is a museum in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Located in an old cannery complex, the museum has exhibits on various types of manufacturing and industry from the early 20th century. There are several hands-on sections with working equipment and other artifacts.
Benjamin Arthur Quarles was an American historian, administrator, educator, and writer, whose scholarship centered on black American social and political history. Major books by Quarles include The Negro in the Civil War (1953), The Negro in the American Revolution (1961), Lincoln and the Negro (1962), and Black Abolitionists (1969). He demonstrated that blacks were active participants in major conflicts and issues of American history. His books were narrative accounts of critical wartime periods that focused on how blacks interacted with their white allies and emphasized blacks' acting as vital agents of change rather than receiving favors from whites.
Elmer P. Martin Jr. was an African-American sociologist and museum executive.
Oliver is a neighborhood in the Eastern district of Baltimore, Maryland. Its boundaries are the south side of North Avenue, the east side of Ensor Street, the west side of Broadway, and the north side of Biddle Street. This neighborhood, adjacent to Johns Hopkins Medical Campus and minutes from the Inner Harbor, lies east of the historic Greenmount Cemetery. The neighborhood is accessible by several bus lines, the Johns Hopkins metro station, Charm City Circulator, Pennsylvania Station (Baltimore), and freeway.
Mary Carter Smith was a noted American educator who helped revive storytelling as an educational tool. She graduated from Coppin State University and was a teacher in the Baltimore City Public School system for thirty-one years. Additionally, she was a co-founder of Big Brothers-Big Sisters of Maryland, founding member of Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America, the Arena Players theatre company and the Griots' Circle of Maryland.
Daniel Coker (1780–1846), born Isaac Wright, was an African American of mixed race from Baltimore, Maryland. Born a slave, after he gained his freedom, he became a Methodist minister in 1802. He wrote one of the few pamphlets published in the South that protested against slavery and supported abolition. In 1816, he helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States, at its first national convention in Philadelphia.
The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture is a resource for information about the lives and history of African American Marylanders. The Lewis Museum's mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, document, and exhibit the contributions of African American Marylanders using its collection of over 11,000 documents and objects and resources drawn from across the country.
Louis S. Diggs was an African-American writer and historian specializing in the African-American history of Baltimore County, Maryland. As a chronicler of the county's African-American legacy, his work illuminates the historic past of its Black communities. In addition to social history, Diggs has published on Baltimore African-American military records from the American Civil War and the Maryland Army National Guard. Diggs died on October 24, 2022, at the age of 90.
John Henry Pinkard was a businessman, banker, and herb doctor in Roanoke, Virginia. He was also known as a spiritualist and clairvoyant. Other people considered him a practitioner of quackery and a charlatan.
The Griot Museum of Black History is a wax museum in St. Louis, Missouri, founded in 1997. Originally named The Black World History Wax Museum, the organization changed its name to The Griot Museum of Black History in 2009. In some west African countries, the griot, is a historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet and/or musician. The griot is a repository of oral tradition and is often seen as a societal leader who preserves and shares cultural traditions of a community. Likewise, the museum collects, preserves, and shares the stories, culture, and history of Black people with a focus on those with a regional connection to St. Louis.
Agnes Kane Callum was a genealogist known for her research into Maryland's African-American history. She was a founding member of the Baltimore Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, a frequent columnist for The Catholic Review, and the founding editor of a black genealogical journal, Flower of the Forest. Callum was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 2014.
The history of African Americans in Baltimore dates back to the 17th century when the first African slaves were being brought to the Province of Maryland. Majority white for most of its history, Baltimore transitioned to having a black majority in the 1970s. As of the 2010 Census, African Americans are the majority population of Baltimore at 63% of the population. As a majority black city for the last several decades with the 5th largest population of African Americans of any city in the United States, African Americans have had an enormous impact on the culture, dialect, history, politics, and music of the city. Unlike many other Northern cities whose African-American populations first became well-established during the Great Migration, Baltimore has a deeply rooted African-American heritage, being home to the largest population of free black people half a century before the Emancipation Proclamation. The migrations of Southern and Appalachian African Americans between 1910 and 1970 brought thousands of African Americans to Baltimore, transforming the city into the second northernmost majority-black city in the United States after Detroit. The city's African-American community is centered in West Baltimore and East Baltimore. The distribution of African Americans on both the West and the East sides of Baltimore is sometimes called "The Black Butterfly", while the distribution of white Americans in Central and Southeast Baltimore is called "The White L."
Landscape with Rainbow is an oil on canvas painting by the African-American artist Robert S. Duncanson. The Hudson River School landscape painting was completed in 1859, while Duncanson was living in Cincinnati, Ohio. It has been in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. since 1983.