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Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture (Visit this link)
Visitors will learn how 200 years of slavery wrenched and sometimes broke the
bonds of family and community among African Americans in Maryland. Men, women
and children were torn from their loved ones, isolated, and sold to strangers.
Yet Maryland’s African Americans continuously recreated and renewed these bonds
of family and community in order to endure the centuries of brutality and
decades of oppression and suppression that followed. Black Marylanders created
tools for survival and self-determination, proving the power of their commitment
to one another by building and sustaining families, communities of worship,
neighborhoods, towns and social organizations.
For two centuries, Africans were brought to Maryland against their will and kept
here by violence, forced to work on plantations and farms, in shops and kitchens
and in iron forges and shipyards. Visitors to the museum will learn how this
tragic history of slavery and oppression enriched the state and the nation, and
how its vestiges harmed our entire society.
Despite the emotional and societal devastation of slavery and oppression,
African Americans developed valuable trades through their native skills and
exploited labor, which they employed in their struggle for opportunity,
achievement and success.
African Americans poured the emotions of a displaced and disenfranchised people
into painting, music, dance and language. The Art and Enlightenment Gallery
tells the story of how Africans arriving in Maryland by slave ship carried with
them ancient cultural traditions and skills in music, art, dance, sculpture,
storytelling and literature.
In the centuries of racism that followed, African Americans used art as a way of
enduring and even overcoming an oppressive society. From this struggle emerged
unique and universal works of music, literature, dance and art. Like artists
everywhere, African Americans used their craft to express a personal sense of
beauty, to strive for excellence in performance and to forge a spiritual
connection with their creator.
http://www.africanamericanculture.org