This is our guide to 20 of the best Black history sites in America, ranked, with the real history behind each one and what you will see when you visit.
I am a retired history teacher who now researches and writes for More Than Just Parks. These are some of the most important places in the country: battlefields of conscience, museums, churches, and memorials that carry the weight of slavery, lynching, and the long fight for civil rights. I have tried to tell their stories with the honesty and gravity they deserve, and I have noted the correct designation and managing agency for each.
Watch the “Twenty & Odd” Film Featuring Many of These Sites
More Than Just Parks helped film and produce “Twenty & Odd,” a National Park Service film that visits several of the sites in this guide. You can watch it below.
The 20 Best Black History Sites at a Glance
| Rank | Site | Managed by | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | U.S. Civil Rights Trail | Multi-state coalition | 15 states |
| 2 | National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | Washington, D.C. |
| 3 | Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park | National Park Service | Atlanta, GA |
| 4 | Rosa Parks Museum | Troy University | Montgomery, AL |
| 5 | National Voting Rights Museum and Institute | Private nonprofit | Selma, AL |
| 6 | Mississippi Civil Rights Museum | State of Mississippi | Jackson, MS |
| 7 | Frederick Douglass National Historic Site | National Park Service | Washington, D.C. |
| 8 | Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial | National Park Service | Washington, D.C. |
| 9 | The National Memorial for Peace and Justice | Equal Justice Initiative | Montgomery, AL |
| 10 | The Legacy Museum | Equal Justice Initiative | Montgomery, AL |
| 11 | National Underground Railroad Freedom Center | Private nonprofit | Cincinnati, OH |
| 12 | Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site | National Park Service | Tuskegee, AL |
| 13 | Negro Leagues Baseball Museum | Private nonprofit | Kansas City, MO |
| 14 | Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site | National Park Service | Tuskegee, AL |
| 15 | Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument | National Park Service | Wilberforce, OH |
| 16 | Nicodemus National Historic Site | National Park Service | Nicodemus, KS |
| 17 | Beale Street Historic District | City of Memphis | Memphis, TN |
| 18 | Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument | National Park Service | Jackson, MS |
| 19 | Museum of the African Diaspora | Private nonprofit | San Francisco, CA |
| 20 | 1921 Black Wall Street Memorial | City of Tulsa / Greenwood | Tulsa, OK |
20. 1921 Black Wall Street Memorial
Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma | Managed by: City of Tulsa and Greenwood community
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We begin with the 1921 Black Wall Street Memorial in Tulsa’s Greenwood District. At the turn of the 20th century, African Americans built Greenwood into one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country, a place Booker T. Washington reportedly called “Black Wall Street.” On May 31, 1921, a white mob destroyed it.
The Tulsa Race Massacre
Over some 18 hours on May 31 and June 1, 1921, armed rioters, many deputized by local police, looted and burned roughly 35 blocks of Greenwood, destroying homes, businesses, churches, schools, a hospital, and the public library. The official death toll was 36, but the Oklahoma Historical Society notes credible estimates run as high as 300. It remains one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history, and one long left out of the textbooks. For more, read Tulsa, 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel and The Burning by Tim Madigan.
Visiting Greenwood
The renovated 1921 Black Wall Street Memorial was unveiled in 2021. Two nearby sites round out a visit: Greenwood Rising, a history center on Black Wall Street, and the Greenwood Cultural Center, whose photographs and survivor testimonials are worth the time. A tour of the district shows how the neighborhood prospered, why it was attacked, and how it was rebuilt.
See more in our guide to historic sites in Oklahoma.
19. Museum of the African Diaspora
Location: San Francisco, California | Managed by: private nonprofit
The term African diaspora describes the dispersion of peoples from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, from the 1500s to the 1800s, which carried millions from West and Central Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco is a contemporary art museum that presents work exclusively by artists of that diaspora.
18. Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument
Location: Jackson, Mississippi | Managed by: National Park Service
This modest ranch house was the home of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, and the place where Medgar was murdered. It is now a national monument, restored to look as it did when the family lived there, and visitors can tour it.
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers was the first field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. He organized voter registration drives and economic boycotts and investigated crimes against Black people. He helped James Meredith integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962. His work made him a target, and on June 12, 1963, he was assassinated in his own driveway. It took until 1994 for his killer to be convicted. “You can kill a man,” Evers once said, “but you can’t kill an idea.”
Myrlie Evers-Williams
Myrlie Evers-Williams spent more than three decades seeking justice for her husband’s murder and then carried his work forward. In 1995 she became national chairwoman of the NAACP, and she delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
“I have reached a point in my life where I understand the pain and the challenges, and my attitude is one of standing up with open arms to meet them all.”
Myrlie Evers-Williams
See more in our guide to historic sites in Mississippi.
17. Beale Street Historic District
Location: Memphis, Tennessee | Managed by: City of Memphis
Beale Street became one of the most important centers of Black commerce and culture in America. It was home to Black-owned businesses and clubs and to Ida B. Wells‘s anti-segregation newspaper, Free Speech, housed in a church built by a congregation of freed slaves. In the first half of the 20th century it gave rise to the Memphis blues, with W. C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, and B. B. King all playing the street.
During the civil rights era, Beale Street was where the community gathered to shop, organize, and protest. When the city’s sanitation workers struck over deadly working conditions in 1968, they marched down Beale Street, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Memphis in support. He was assassinated there on April 4, 1968.
What to See on Beale Street
Three blocks of clubs, restaurants, and shops in downtown Memphis blend blues, jazz, rock and roll, R&B, and gospel. Stop at B. B. King’s Blues Club, the Withers Collection Museum and Gallery for its historic photographs, and the W. C. Handy Museum, dedicated to the man known as the Father of the Blues. The Beale Street Music Festival each May draws visitors from around the world.
See more in our guide to Tennessee national parks.
16. Nicodemus National Historic Site
Location: Nicodemus, Kansas | Managed by: National Park Service
Nicodemus tells a chapter of westward expansion that is too often left out. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved African Americans left Kentucky for the “promised land” of Kansas. In 1877 they founded the town of Nicodemus, the first Black community west of the Mississippi River, and the only one of its kind that survives as a living town today.
“Without a struggle, there can be no progress.”
Frederick Douglass
What to See at Nicodemus
Visitors can take a self-guided or ranger-guided tour of the historic buildings, including the St. Francis Hotel, the A.M.E. Church, the First Baptist Church, the township hall, and the schoolhouse. Begin at the Township Hall visitor center for exhibits and short films. Some descendants of the original settlers still live in town.
15. Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument
Location: Wilberforce, Ohio | Managed by: National Park Service
This monument preserves the home of Colonel Charles Young, one of the most accomplished and least remembered figures in American military history. Born into slavery during the Civil War, Young won an appointment to West Point in 1884 and became only the third African American to graduate from the academy.
The First Black Superintendent of a National Park
Young commanded an all-Black cavalry regiment of Buffalo Soldiers. In the summer of 1903, when the U.S. Army managed the parks, he led his troops to Sequoia and General Grant, now Sequoia National Park and part of Kings Canyon National Park, and served as acting superintendent. He was the first African American to hold such a post. Under his leadership his troops built the first wagon road into the Giant Forest and stopped poaching in the parks. A sequoia tree was later named in his honor.
“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”
Booker T. Washington
Related: our guide to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
14. Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site
Location: Tuskegee, Alabama | Managed by: National Park Service
Founded on July 4, 1881, by Booker T. Washington, the Tuskegee Institute trained Black teachers and tradespeople in an era when education was the surest path from freedom to opportunity. Washington emphasized practical skills, from modern farming to construction and carpentry. In 1985 the school became Tuskegee University, the only college that is part of the National Park System.
George Washington Carver
You cannot tell the story of Tuskegee without its most famous faculty member, George Washington Carver. Most people remember him for peanuts, but as historian Mark Hersey argues in My Work Is That of Conservation, his real legacy was teaching farming methods that restored soil ruined by cotton and gave formerly enslaved people a measure of independence. He was an early voice for what we now call sustainability.
What to See at Tuskegee
The George Washington Carver Museum offers exhibits and a bookstore, and rangers lead free tours of “The Oaks,” Carver’s home. Visitors are also free to explore the historic campus, with maps available at the museum.
See more in our guide to historic sites in Alabama.
13. Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
Location: Kansas City, Missouri | Managed by: private nonprofit
This museum honors the African American athletes barred from the major leagues. Black players were forced off integrated teams by Jim Crow around 1900, so they formed their own teams and barnstormed the country. In 1920, Andrew “Rube” Foster and a handful of Midwestern owners met at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City to form the Negro National League.
What to See
The self-guided museum pairs text panels, hundreds of photographs, and film with a timeline of baseball and African American history. For deeper reading, try A Complete History of the Negro Leagues: 1884 to 1955 by Mark Ribowsky or Shades of Glory by Lawrence D. Hogan. If your travels take you to New York City, the Jackie Robinson Museum is worth a stop too.
12. Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site
Location: Tuskegee, Alabama | Managed by: National Park Service
At Moton Field, the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site honors the first African American military aviators in U.S. history. These men had to fight prejudice at home before they could fight the enemy abroad. Pressure from a Howard University lawsuit, the Black press, and the NAACP persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to open military aviation to Black Americans during World War II.
Their Record
Training began with twelve cadets and one officer, Captain Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who became the Air Force’s first African American general. They formed the 99th Pursuit Squadron, later joined by three more to form the 332nd Fighter Group. Flying combat in Italy, these pilots shot down hundreds of enemy aircraft and compiled a distinguished record escorting bombers across thousands of missions.
“The Tuskegee story is an important civil rights story of Americans who happen to be black, in service to their country, their family, and to their friends.”
Col. Charles E. McGee, Tuskegee Airman
What to See
Begin with the 28-minute film, then tour the museum inside the restored hangars and walk the grounds at Moton Field. A few facts worth knowing:
- No one called them the “Tuskegee Airmen” during the war; author Charles E. Francis coined the name in his 1955 book.
- Eleanor Roosevelt flew with pilot Charles A. Anderson, the “father of Black aviation,” and the photograph helped prove Black Americans were fit to fly.
- The first three African American generals in the Air Force, Benjamin O. Davis, Daniel “Chappie” James, Jr., and Lucius Theus, were all Tuskegee Airmen.
- In 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award given by Congress.
11. National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio | Managed by: private nonprofit
The Underground Railroad was not a railroad at all but a network of people, Black and white, who sheltered and guided enslaved people escaping the South. “Conductors” led freedom seekers between hidden “stations” and “safe houses” run by “stationmasters.” This center in Cincinnati tells that story, and connects it to the present.
Harriet Tubman
No conductor is more famous than Harriet Tubman. Born into slavery as Araminta Ross, she escaped from Maryland in 1849 and then returned again and again to lead others to freedom. During the Civil War she served the Union Army as a scout and spy, gathering intelligence on Confederate positions and helping to free enslaved people. For more, read Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman by Sarah Hopkins Bradford.
“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say. I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Harriet Tubman
What to See
Begin in the Harriet Tubman Theater with the animated film “Suite for Freedom,” then move to “Invisible: Slavery Today,” a permanent exhibition on modern slavery and human trafficking told through the lives of five survivors. The center notes that an estimated 40 million people are enslaved worldwide today, more than at any point in history. The original NPS image below shows visitors at a reconstructed slave pen.
Related: our guide to the 10 best Civil War sites in America.
10. The Legacy Museum
Location: Montgomery, Alabama | Managed by: Equal Justice Initiative
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration traces a direct line from slavery through lynching and Jim Crow to mass incarceration today. Run by the Equal Justice Initiative, it sits near the site of one of the country’s most prominent slave auctions, steps from the rail station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked.
What You Will See
On entering, visitors pass replicas of slave pens, with narration drawn from first-person accounts of enslaved people. Beyond slavery, the exhibits document the racial terror of Jim Crow and connect that history to present-day mass incarceration and police violence.
Slavery by Another Name
To understand the history the museum confronts, read Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon, the 2009 Pulitzer winner. It documents how, long after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, tens of thousands of Black Americans were arrested on flimsy charges and leased as forced labor to mines, railroads, and corporations including U.S. Steel, held in involuntary servitude for decades after slavery was officially abolished.
Related: our guide to the 10 best civil rights sites in America.
9. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Location: Montgomery, Alabama | Managed by: Equal Justice Initiative
Opened on April 26, 2018, this is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching and racial terror. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,400 African American men, women, and children were murdered by white mobs across the United States.
Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
The memorial uses sculpture and design to confront that history directly. At its center hang 800 weathered steel monuments, one for each county where a documented racial terror lynching took place, each inscribed with the victims’ names. Visitors are led on a journey from slavery through lynching and into the civil rights era. To go deeper, read Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W. E. B. Du Bois.
8. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial
Location: Washington, D.C. | Managed by: National Park Service
On the National Mall, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial honors the man described as the “conscience of the nation.” A Baptist minister, Dr. King became the leading voice of the civil rights movement and advanced its cause through nonviolence. His marches built the pressure that produced the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The memorial is one of the top sites to visit in Washington, D.C.
7. Frederick Douglass National Historic Site
Location: Washington, D.C. | Managed by: National Park Service
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818, escaped as a young man, and became the most powerful voice of the abolitionist movement. His words rallied Northern opinion against slavery, and his example reshaped how the nation understood the humanity of enslaved people. This site preserves Cedar Hill, the home where he spent the last 17 years of his life.
The estate became part of the National Park Service in 1962. Visitors can tour the home, including his library, and the bookstore run by America’s National Parks carries works by and about Douglass.
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
Frederick Douglass
6. Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
Location: Jackson, Mississippi | Managed by: State of Mississippi
Mississippi was at the center of the struggle for racial equality, and this state-run museum tells that story without flinching. Visitors meet Mississippians like Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Vernon Dahmer, along with those who came from elsewhere to stand with them.
Eight interactive galleries trace the systematic oppression of Black Mississippians and their fight for equality. Seven of them encircle a central space called “This Little Light of Mine,” where a sculpture glows brighter and the music of the movement swells as visitors gather. (Source: Mississippi Civil Rights Museum)
5. National Voting Rights Museum and Institute
Location: Selma, Alabama | Managed by: private nonprofit
“Hands that picked cotton can pick our president.” That was the cry of activists who risked their lives for the right to vote. The National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, near the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tells the story of that fight, from Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery march through the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
4. Rosa Parks Museum
Location: Montgomery, Alabama | Managed by: Troy University
Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum stands on the site where Rosa Parks was arrested. It honors her life and the Montgomery Bus Boycott her act of resistance set in motion, the campaign that integrated the city’s buses and drew the world’s attention.
Rosa Parks’s Life and Legacy
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. Her arrest sparked a boycott that lasted 381 days and made her known as “the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” Parks was a seasoned activist, having served as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP for more than a decade before that day.
A Life Dedicated to Service
After the boycott, Parks lost her job and faced death threats, and she and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit in 1957. She remained active in the movement, worked for years in Congressman John Conyers’s office, and in 1999 received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor in the country. To learn more, read Rosa Parks: My Story by Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins.
What to See
The museum holds Parks’s original fingerprint arrest record, a 1950s Montgomery city bus, court documents and police reports, and a restored 1955 station wagon, one of the “rolling churches” that carried boycotters to work.
3. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park
Location: Atlanta, Georgia | Managed by: National Park Service
In Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, this park preserves the world Dr. King came from. In the 1950s and 1960s he led the movement to end segregation through nonviolent protest and delivered some of the most important speeches of the century.
What to See
The park includes Dr. King’s boyhood home, the original Ebenezer Baptist Church where he and his father preached, and the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, where Dr. King and Coretta Scott King are entombed. The Park Service has restored the surrounding buildings to their 1930s and 1940s appearance, so you can walk the neighborhood much as King knew it growing up. (Source: National Park Service)
A History of the Movement
The finest overall history of the movement is Taylor Branch’s trilogy: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge. Together they tell the story of race and democracy through the lives of the everyday people who carried the movement.
See more in our guide to historic sites in Georgia.
2. National Museum of African American History and Culture
Location: Washington, D.C. | Managed by: Smithsonian Institution
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the largest cultural institution devoted entirely to the African American story. If you can visit only one museum on this list, make it this one.
A Journey Through History
The museum’s design carries you through the African American experience in both space and time. Visitors begin below ground in the dark, cramped hold of a slave ship and climb upward through two centuries of struggle, emerging into light only after passing through the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s. The building itself, wrapped in a bronze lattice inspired by African American ironwork, embraces its content.
“This building will sing for all of us.”
Lonnie G. Bunch, founding director
What You Will See
- The Harriet Tubman collection, including her hymnal and a lace shawl given to her by Queen Victoria
- A Jim Crow railroad passenger car from 1922
- Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac convertible
- A Tuskegee Airmen PT-13 Stearman trainer plane
- The casket of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose 1955 murder helped galvanize the movement
- A slave cabin from Edisto Island, South Carolina
- Works by Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Kehinde Wiley, and Amy Sherald (Source: Smithsonian)
1. U.S. Civil Rights Trail
Location: 15 states across America | Managed by: a multi-state coalition
How do you choose a single best Black history site? We decided not to. The U.S. Civil Rights Trail links more than 100 churches, schools, courthouses, and other landmarks across 15 states, from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Together they tell the story of the long fight for equal rights, and together they earn the top spot. Here are two of the most powerful.
Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail
This National Park Service trail follows the 54-mile route of the 1965 voting rights marches. On March 25, 1965, Dr. King led thousands of marchers to the steps of the Alabama capitol in Montgomery, the end of a five-day journey that had begun in violence.
The first attempt came on March 7, 1965, remembered as Bloody Sunday. The 25-year-old activist John Lewis led some 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. On the far side, state troopers gave a two-minute warning and then charged with clubs and tear gas. Lewis suffered a skull fracture and was one of 58 people treated for injuries. The footage aired that night, and the nation was appalled.
Lewis: I was hit on my head right here. I was hit with a billy club, and I saw the state trooper that hit me. I was hit twice, once when I was lying down and was attempting to get up.
John Lewis, congressional testimony on Bloody Sunday
On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress and aligned himself with the marchers: “Their cause must be our cause too. And we shall overcome.” A federal judge then ordered Alabama to allow the march, and some 25,000 people joined Dr. King on the capitol steps. Five months later, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
You can drive the route the marchers walked. Start at the Selma Interpretive Center at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Other Selma stops include Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church and the National Voting Rights Museum. In Montgomery you will find the Rosa Parks Museum, the Dexter Avenue church, and the state capitol.
Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument
The images that came out of Birmingham in 1963, of police dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators, including children, did as much as anything to shift the conscience of the nation. The Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument takes in roughly four city blocks of downtown, centered on the A. G. Gaston Motel, headquarters of the 1963 campaign. From here, movement leaders including Dr. King made the key decisions of the nonviolent campaign to overturn the city’s segregation laws.
Landmarks here include the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a Klan bomb on September 15, 1963 killed four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair; Kelly Ingram Park, where police dogs and fire hoses were turned on child marchers; the 4th Avenue Historic District, the heart of Black-owned business under segregation; and Bethel Baptist Church, bombed three times between 1956 and 1962.
“If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.”
John Lewis
The 20 Best Black History Sites
- U.S. Civil Rights Trail (15 states)
- National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, Atlanta, Georgia
- Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, Alabama
- National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, Selma, Alabama
- Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Jackson, Mississippi
- Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington, D.C.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C.
- The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama
- The Legacy Museum, Montgomery, Alabama
- National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
- Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, Tuskegee, Alabama
- Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Kansas City, Missouri
- Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, Tuskegee, Alabama
- Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument, Wilberforce, Ohio
- Nicodemus National Historic Site, Nicodemus, Kansas
- Beale Street Historic District, Memphis, Tennessee
- Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, Jackson, Mississippi
- Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California
- 1921 Black Wall Street Memorial, Tulsa, Oklahoma
More Than Just Parks was founded by my sons Jim Pattiz and Will Pattiz, collectively known as the Pattiz Brothers, and they love the national parks. I wrote this guide. I am their father, a retired history teacher who has spent years visiting the places I once taught about.
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