Black Urban Design in a 'Changing America'

The underground history galleries of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture are separated by two transitional years: 1877, the year Reconstruction ended, and 1968, a year that was, as the museum’s website notes, “a turning point in the African-American freedom movement.” This was the year that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and it was the year that the first elected African-American mayors of major U.S. cities took office: Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana.

It’s also the starting point for the museum’s exhibition, “A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond,” for which Michelle Joan Wilkinson serves as a curator, along with co-curator William Pretzer. It’s through the lenses of architecture and design that she has chosen to base much of her work. This is seen most vividly in the section of the exhibit titled “Shifting Landscapes: Cities and Suburbs.”