History
The Davis Avenue Branch of the Mobile Public Library was built in 1931 to serve the needs of the local African American community. The building was modeled after the Ben May Main Library but constructed on a smaller scale. The local African American community helped collect used books for the library and raise funds for the acquisition of new books. This reflected the social reality of segregation, when African Americans were prevented from participating fully in educational endeavors and were provided with separate educational facilities. Following desegregation, this branch library became a repository for government documents. In 1992 it reopened as the National African American Archives and Museum. It was founded by Delores S. Dees, the organization's first president and executive director. The museum building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was designed by noted architect George Bigelow Rogers.
Read more about this topic: National African American Archives And Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)