Find one of the world's largest museums devoted to African American history right here. It was founded in 1965 by Dr. Charles H. Wright, a Detroit obstetrician who, moved by a memorial he saw in Denmark, resolved to create a place that would tell the full story of Black life and achievement. The museum began in a row of houses and grew into this striking domed building, opened in 1997.
Its centerpiece is the core exhibit And Still We Rise, which walks visitors from Africa through the Middle Passage, slavery, emancipation, the Great Migration that brought hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners north to Detroit's factories, and the civil rights struggle. The great rotunda beneath the glass dome is one of the largest such spaces in the country, often used for cultural gatherings and, on occasion, for honoring the city's departed leaders. Picture the ringed glass dome overhead, then consider that this institution grew from one doctor's conviction that a people's history deserved a monument.