Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, former president and CEO of the Milwaukee Urban League Ralph Hollman and others celebrate the donations. (Photo from County Executive Chris Abele’s facebook page.)
Shutting its doors in 2008, America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee is close to reopening and achieving its $1.5 million fundraising goal.
Earlier this year, County Executive Chris Abele announced a challenge grant as a catalyst to help the Dr. James Cameron Legacy Foundation raise the remaining portion of their 2018 fundraising goal. On February 25, Abele delivered and presented the organization with a check for $100,000.
Abele’s donation also helped generate much-needed awareness and media attention for the museum, which further bolstered the fundraising efforts. The latest fundraising drive ended on February 25, marking Dr. James Cameron’s 105th birthday.
“I’m grateful to have the opportunity to support this amazing and important museum,” said Abele. “I truly believe that clarity and openness about this chapter of our nation’s history is more important now than it ever has been. Milwaukee will be a stronger community for both knowing that history and celebrating Dr. Cameron’s courage and profound commitment–along with many other advocates and activists from diverse backgrounds–to repairing and healing our racial divisions.”
Cameron, who is the only known survivor of a lynching, founded the America’s Black Holocaust Museum in 1984. After Cameron’s death in 2006 and the economic downturn in 2008, the museum was forced to give up its building, but launched an online virtual museum in 2012.
According to the ABHM, the new museum will include exhibits on African people before captivity, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, auction blocks, the civil rights movement, as well as local and national civil rights leaders. One of the museum’s goals is to share the under-told stories that are an integral part of United States history. The new museum is built on the same footprint as its predecessor on the corner of Vel R. Phillips Ave. and North Ave.
For more information about the America’s Black Holocaust Museum, you can visit their website, abhmuseum.org. The organization is still accepting donations as well, which support the museum’s educational programming and operations.