For six decades, Anacostia has been the only Smithsonian where residents are at once visitors, subjects of study, curators, and producers. “The community became the museum,” a former interim director, James Early, told me. It was the first Smithsonian dedicated to Black history, and the museum always wore the distinction proudly. In 1987, it relocated to a newly built structure and was renamed, simply, the Anacostia Museum. The new building’s brick facade was intended to mimic the pattern of kente cloth.
In 1972, Louise Daniel Hutchinson, the museum’s director of research, established an ambitious oral-history project with Anacostia residents, which became the greater Smithsonian’s first such collection. Researchers fanned out into the community, conducting interviews while also collecting donated items of cultural significance. Along with recordings, researchers returned with family Bibles, good china, and valuable mementos, including a porcelain pin box given to a Black seamstress by First Lady Edith Wilson.
Oral history, now a common part of the Smithsonian’s arsenal, has since become something of a specialty at the Anacostia Community Museum, which was given its current name in 2006. The form requires expertise in interviewing, as well as subjects’ trust. “Every exhibit is this major archival and primary-research undertaking,” Dominique Hazzard, a former staff member at the museum and a second-generation Anacostia resident, told me. She was a curator of the 2021–22 exhibit “Food for the People: Eating and Activism in Greater Washington,” for which Hazzard and others gathered more than 100 oral histories from community members and activists.
Because of the museum’s work, its artifacts have been treated with the care and seriousness that they deserve, and are now an official part of the country’s record and story. They sit in the nation’s archives with its founding documents, with dinosaur bones, with the space shuttle.
Still, foot traffic has always been low, and it’s been difficult to get the tourists who travel to the larger Smithsonians to come across the river. Until gentrification swept into the area, the neighborhood remained largely isolated from the rest of the city—although that force promised more amenities and connections, it also displaced Black residents. The ACM, which protects the memories of that community, is also itself facing the possibility of elimination.