FAMU to be featured in Smithsonian museum's new HBCU exhibition

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Florida A&M University is having an expanded presence at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) with the debut of a new exhibition.

As part of a new initiative, the Washington, DC-based museum is launching an exhibition Jan. 16 titled “At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs” to celebrate the legacy of historically Black colleges and universities. FAMU is one of five institutions being featured to have some of their archival collections showcased.

“This exhibition honors the legacy of HBCUs as cultural and educational powerhouses,” Shanita Brackett, the museum’s acting director, said in the museum’s Jan. 14 release. “Through these collections from our partners institutions, we see the breadth of Black intellectual excellence, activism and artistic achievement, reinforcing the vital role HBCUs play in shaping American history.”

Since being established in 2016, the museum − a 400,000-square-foot Smithsonian Institution facility located next to the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC − has welcomed 13 million in-person visitors and millions digitally.

Besides FAMU, the four other HBCUs being featured in the national museum’s exhibition are Clark Atlanta University, Jackson State University, Texas Southern University and Tuskegee University – all universities that have distinguished archives and museum collections on their campuses.

One of FAMU’s artifacts included in the exhibit is a vegetable gardening extension program brochure, which was provided to the museum by FAMU’s Meek Eaton Black Archives and the College of Agriculture and Food Sciences Collection. The artifact highlights the FAMU Cooperative Extension Tractor Clinic of the 1960s, which worked to meet the needs of farmers by providing key demonstrations and skills, according to the museum.

But besides the archival materials being featured in the new exhibition, FAMU currently has objects on display in the museum, including a B-flat trumpet that was owned by former FAMU Marching Band Director William Patrick Foster and a band uniform jacket manufactured in the 1950s.

Other artifacts in the new HBCU exhibition consist of a painting by artist Frederick Flemister from CAU’s art museum that depicts a group of people mourning a lynching victim, a notebook journal owned by poet and writer Margaret Walker from JSU, a ceramic bottle by artist Carroll Harris Simms from TSU’s museum and campus bricks made by Tuskegee students as tuition from the university’s archives.

Additional historic materials in the HBCU exhibition will include one of the few known color videos of agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver as well as archival photographs documenting student activism, campus life and African American cultural movements.

While the exhibition will be open at the museum from Jan. 16 to July 19, it will travel to at least five locations across the country during a tour through 2029, including a stop at FAMU in late 2028 into early 2029. The locations and dates of all the stops announced so far are: