The Museum Turns Ten

Stand on the National Mall and look for the building that does not look like the others. Every museum around it is white marble and columns. One of them is bronze, three tiers of latticework rising like a crown, glowing gold when the sun gets low. That is the National Museum of African American History and Culture. On September 24, 2026, it turns ten years old.

I want to tell you why that number matters, and then I want to tell you how to be there.

The idea is a hundred years older than the building. Black veterans of the Civil War asked for a national memorial in 1915. Congress said no, then said maybe, then said nothing, for decades. It took until 2003 for the law to pass, and until 2016 for the doors to open. The founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch III, started with no collection, no site, and no building. He built all three. Today he runs the entire Smithsonian.

On opening day, President Barack Obama rang a bell from a church founded by freed people. That bell, the museum said, was a signal to the whole country. Ten years later, the signal is still ringing.

Here is the museum by the numbers, and every one of them is a person who chose to show up.

Read that middle number again. Forty five thousand objects. Most of them were donated by regular families who opened a closet, a trunk, an attic, and said: this belongs to everybody now.

“They did not build a museum about us. They built a museum out of us.”

The anniversary weekend is called Welcome Home: Our Legacy Continues, and the museum is also calling it The Reunion. It runs September 24 through 27. Here is the schedule as the museum has announced it.

The Sweet Home Café inside the museum runs a special anniversary menu from September 25 to 27, put together by executive chef Ramin Coles, and a yearlong tenth anniversary menu starts September 28. If you have never had the café's cornbread, plan your day around it.

Do the three things that actually matter, from anywhere.

This year America is celebrating 250 years as a country. The museum is celebrating ten. Those two birthdays belong in the same sentence, because the museum's whole argument is that you cannot tell one story without the other. The bronze crown was designed after ironwork made by enslaved craftsmen in New Orleans and Charleston. The building is literally made of the labor the country tried not to name.

That is also why the second half of the Greenwood story belongs in a museum and not just in a memorial. Go in September if you can get to Washington, and go in April if you cannot. Timed passes are free. Membership is 25 dollars a year, and it puts your name on the list of people who own this place. That is the whole point of a homecoming. You do not visit home. You belong to it.