Unheralded

JEFF OLSON: Photo Gallery —National Museum of African American History and Culture

Alexandria, Va., photographer Jeff Olson recently made his first visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian Institution  museum established in December 2003. The museum’s building was designed by Davud Adjaye and is on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The museum has about 37,000 objects in its collection related to such subjects as community, family, the visual and performing arts, religion, civil rights, slavery and segregation, including items owned by Harriet Tubman, the glass-topped casket originally used to display and bury the body of 14-year-old Emmett Till, the victim of racially motivated torture and murder in Mississippi, the dress that Rosa Park was sewing the day she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., a trumpet owned by jass musician Louis Armstrong, a dress owned by actress and singer Pearl Bailey and a cape and jumpsuit owned by American soul singer James Brown. Olson said it would take probably a dozen visits to take it all in.





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