Federal Grant Program Gives A Boost to Black Museums

Pittsburgh's center for African American culture is named in honor of August Wilson. (E Pablo Kosmicki - AP)

In two years, the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh plans to move into a new facility to showcase its interdisciplinary approach to telling the story of African Americans.

Founded in 2002 as the African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh, the museum changed its name this year to pay tribute to native son Wilson, whose dramas grew out of life in the city's black neighborhoods. The building campaign is going well; $27 million of the needed $36 million is in hand. But the money to develop programming and hire staff has been tough to raise.

Yesterday Neil A. Barclay, the museum's president, said he was relaxing slightly. The Wilson Center was selected to receive one of the first Museum Grants for African American History and Culture, part of a new effort by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services to help African American museums with management, programming and operations.

Barclay said, "We want to look at the contemporary manifestation of our culture. When you go to any indigenous country, you don't see the divisions between visual arts, the performing experience, food, music and the community. We want all that to be interwoven. We have to find a way to do it and operational money is so hard to find. This grant is critical to us and helps us do our approach at the level we want to."

In his appeal, Barclay told the institute what he needed more than anything else was a director of programs. The agency is awarding the center $58,000, which will be matched by the Heinz Endowments.

The new grant program, which will today announce the first recipients of grants totaling more than $800,000, grew out of the founding legislation for the National Museum of African American History and Culture that the Smithsonian Institution is planning for the Mall. The law asked the government to help improve the operations of smaller African American museums. Supporters of African American cultural institutions were worried the new museum on the Mall would siphon off money and collections that might have gone to smaller museums.

That worry has subsided, said Lawrence J. Pijeaux Jr., president of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and president of the Association of African American Museums. "I am glad these grants have been awarded to a range of institutions. The feeling in the field now is that there will be a positive working relationships with the museum on the Mall and other African American organizations," said Pijeaux.

The Civil Rights Institute received a grant of $131,000. The money will be used for management training at 15 African American museums. The AAAM received an award of nearly $114,000. The five other recipients are: the John Gilmore Riley Center and Museum of African American History and Culture in Tallahassee ($150,000); the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History in Brooklyn (nearly $40,000); the Penn Center in St. Helena Island, S.C. ($120,000); Hampton University Museum in Hampton, Va. ($83,000); and the Legacy Museum of African American History in Lynchburg, Va. ($106,000).