The Alexandria Black History Museum, part of Historic Alexandria, is thrilled to announce its second prestigious Museum Grant for African American History and Culture from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This $99,772 grant will support an exciting project, running from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025, that will further enable visitors to explore the Museum’s valuable collections beyond the confines of the museum walls.
The museum's first grant, awarded in 2021, enabled the cataloging, digitizing, and public sharing of four significant archival collections. These collections spotlight documents, photographs and artifacts from notable figures like Alexandrian activists Ferdinand T. Day and Annie B. Rose, Washingtonian opera singer Ben Holt, and public relations trailblazer Moss H. Kendrix. This project culminated in the new exhibition, Moss H. Kendrix: Reframing the Black Image, which opened in June 2024 and provides a powerful exploration of Kendrix's transformative impact on public perceptions of African Americans through strategic public relations.
Building on this success, the new grant will digitize the museum’s entire object collection, making it available online. This includes materials from William “Bill” Euille, Alexandria's first African American mayor, 1980s photographs of the Parker-Gray neighborhood, images from local African American church services, rare issues of The Home News newspaper from 1902-1903, artifacts from African American businesses in Alexandria, and memorabilia from Earl Lloyd, the first African American to play in the NBA.
Additionally, a celebrated fund-raising cookbook, A Kind Heart and a Light Hand, and other significant items will be digitized to showcase Alexandria’s rich and diverse history.
An additional component of the grant is to make accessible online catalog records of approximately 4,000 volumes from the non-circulating Watson Reading Room library. This will include updating existing records and creating 1,000 new ones, all accessible online.
This initiative is part of Alexandria Black History Museum’s ongoing commitment to making history accessible. Previous digitizing efforts led to the launch of Historic Alexandria Collections Online (HACO) in 2020, featuring items from the Funn Collection, the Parker-Gray Photographic Collection, and the Black Lives Remembered Collection, which documents activism in Alexandria post-George Floyd’s death.
The digital content created by this project will support the invaluable work and ongoing mission of Historic Alexandria and the Alexandria Black History Museum to tell stories of the underrepresented and marginalized, highlighting their central role in the American narrative, both locally and nationally.