Nation’s largest African-American history museum at risk in Detroit

[NNadir]

Nation’s largest African-American history museum at risk in Detroit

“And every time, the African-American people survived,” she exclaimed. “They would say, ‘We shall overcome!’ And they always did!”

The docent might have been speaking hopefully about the challenge facing not black America but her own imperiled institution, the Charles H. Wright Museum. The Wright, the nation’s largest museum of African-American history, waits anxiously to see whether bankrupt Detroit will be able to provide any funding in the coming budget cycle.

“I don’t think we can sustain it without support from the city, I don’t think we can,” said Juanita Moore, the Wright’s CEO.

The 49-year-old museum’s plight has been all but ignored in a bankruptcy process in which the international headlines have most often focused on whether the Detroit Institute of Arts would be forced to sell off its treasures to help reduce the city’s $18 billion debt. In the 120-page plan released Friday by Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, the DIA figures prominently, with a bevy of museum benefactors promising to raise $100 million in a complex deal that would shield it from auctioning its fine art. (Orr’s proposal must be approved by a judge and relies, among other contingencies, on the state legislature providing $350 million.)

Not mentioned in the plan were any of the other cultural institutions owned, operated or in some way funded by the city’s coffers, of which the Wright traditionally receives the largest sum and is considered the most financially challenged.

I thought everyone should know...

Museums, like libraries, are important and beautiful places where one becomes...

[Starry Messenger]

1. k&r

[amandabeech]

2. I would like to see both the Wright Museum and the DIA saved.

And the area around them revitalized.

People just don't realize how much Detroit has to offer. Plenty of room for any type of business or industry, and plenty of water to be used, cleaned and returned to its source.

[NNadir]

3. I would like to see all of our cities restored and productive.

But it's a low priority in this country, to save the old industrial cities, to make them work again.

I live near Trenton, which was once an industrial powerhouse. It has a beautiful location, fine old, if decaying houses, plenty of space but it's being allowed to rot, all except for the sign on the bridge, "Trenton Makes, the World Takes." Regrettably the sign is merely history. It's very sad, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee. They built the middle class.