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This Museum Is Fighting the Erasure of Black Music History
The National Museum of African American Music sets the music record straight when it comes to U.S. history
The official recordings of history are inherently a measure of value, a tapestry of researched stories deemed worthy of memory. But the truth is that entire religious belief systems were stripped from Africans entered into slavery, songs were stolen from Black lips to be immortalized by White faces, and some schools even allow parents to opt out of Black history even as a racial reckoning sweeps the country.
To that end, the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) in Nashville, Tennessee, is 56,000 square feet of corrective justice.
“Places like this fly in the face of — and resist—Black erasure, which I think is frankly futile,” Henry Beecher Hicks III, CEO and president of NMAAM, tells Momentum. “History tells us it is futile [to erase us,] because we ain’t going nowhere. But to the extent some would try to take us in that direction, a museum like this demonstrates people of goodwill can come together and fight back.”
