Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History hosted the inaugural Black Bottom | Black Legacy Festival on Saturday and Sunday, drawing residents together to celebrate the city’s past, present and future through storytelling panels, oral history workshops and musical performances centered on preserving local Black history.
The two-day event, organized by Black Bottom Archives, was introduced to viewers by CBS News Detroit. As reported by The Wright, the festival featured programming built around preserving local Black history and community memory.
The centerpiece of the weekend was the debut of seven new Black Detroit community archives, created by participants in the Preserving Black Legacy Fellowship, according to ClickOnDetroit. The fellowship trains an intergenerational cohort of local residents to collect and preserve neighborhood oral histories, and as part of the yearlong program, fellows build neighborhood-specific digital exhibits on Historypin using oral history interviews and historical records, per Black Bottom Archives. Each fellow focuses on a distinct Detroit neighborhood so that hyper-local stories get documented rather than folded into a single citywide narrative.
A Museum Fighting to Reopen Its Doors
One fellow, archivist Kamila Shakur, presented research on the Hush House museum in Detroit’s Northwest Goldberg neighborhood, an activist-led historical home that has been closed since 2021 and is now the subject of efforts to reopen it, the station’s report noted. Educator Charles Simmons grew up in the Wabash Avenue house before turning it into a community museum, according to the same account…