All Around The African World Museum

Museum History...

Dr. Babakubwa Kweku

(Willie D. Davis, Jr., Ph.D.)

Phone:517-580-7181

E-mail: kweku@africanamericanmuseum.org

To contact us:

The museum opened at El Hajj El Shabazz Academy in Lansing Michigan in 1996  as the pictorial and historical wall design for the school’s hallways. The Museum was the brainchild of Dr. Willie Davis, Jr., Ph.D. who got the idea from others and carried it through. Two major influences were the work of Dr. Charles Wright who was the founder of the African America Museum in Detroit and it’s humble beginnings in a trailer and then a house and the work of Dr. Ivan Van Sertima who wrote the book “They Came Before Columbus” and his subsequent work with writers, researchers and scholars on the African presence in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Dr. Davis’s travel to these continents and to Australia and South America also helped to add the fervor the create the Museum. After  El Hajj Malik Shabazz Academy moved to a new location and acquired a great artist rendition of Africa’s relationship to African Americans the museum moved to it’s present location at 1134 and 1136 Shepard Street in Lansing Michigan and reopened on September 1, 2000 amid a wonderful occasion with libations being poured under the presence of the Chief of the Akuapem South District in Ghana, Lansing’s African Sister City.

There are several authors who made their mark discovering information and publishing information about the African  Diaspora or people of African Descent throughout the world. Their work has inspired me to travel the world to see and record the evidence of their information through pictures and artifacts through a museum format. This also allows me to concentrate my energies in continuing and expanding their work in a format in which I and lay people are comfortable with.