Banneker-Douglass Museum​ Receives Sizable National Grant

ANNAPOLIS, MD —An 1875 brick church in Annapolis has seen many people walk through its doors. It started out as the Mt. Moriah African Methodist Episcopal Church, now an historical landmark built in the Gothic Revival style.

The church served as a meeting hall for the First African Methodist Episcopal Church for almost 100 years, then was leased to the Maryland Commission on African-American History and Culture, becoming Maryland's official museum for African-American history and culture. It sits within the boundaries of the Colonial Annapolis Historic District.

Eventually the building was renamed the Banneker-Douglass Museum and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Many famous African-American Maryland residents are represented at the museum, including Kunta Kinte, Benjamin Banneker, James Pennington, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Matthew Henson and Thurgood Marshall.

However, many artifacts and important historical pieces have sat abandoned in a dusty third floor room because the museum hasn't had the funding to properly care for them. But thanks to a $50,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, one of 14 distributed across the entire country, something can finally be done to preserve these items now and for the future.

"The space is going to afford us the opportunity where we can have visiting scholars and curators come and actually utilize our collection and storage facility because it'll be an actual professional space," Chanel Compton, the museum's executive director, told WMAR.

Renovations to the building should be complete by 2020. They will include climate-controlled rooms and shelving for small objects.