"The African American Odyssey" opens Feb. 5 in all three of the Library of Congress buildings on Capitol Hill. The exhibition will be open through May 2, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The Library is closed on Sundays and federal holidays.
The exhibition is being sponsored by the Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc., the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, CITIBANK, the Fannie Mae Foundation, Home Box Office and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress.
Additionally, a gift from the Citicorp Foundation to the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress will launch a five-year effort to transmit portions of "The African American Odyssey" and related rare items from the Library's vast African American collections to classrooms, libraries, community centers and homes electronically via the Internet.
The major presentation of the exhibition (detailed in this issue's cover story) is located in the Thomas Jefferson Building's Northwest Gallery and Pavilion. Titled "The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship," the display explores black America's quest for equality from the early national period through the 20th century.
In the James Madison Building will be displayed the portion of the exhibition titled "The African American Odyssey: Fine Prints and Photographs by 20th Century African American Artists." Included are many of the most renowned African American artists of the 20th century: Romare Bearden, Bob Blackburn, Elizabeth Catlett, Roland Freeman, Sam William, Chester Higgins Jr., Jacob Lawrence, Martin Parer, Raymond Seth and James Van Der Zee. The images range from the portrayal of leisure activities to depictions of varied religious affiliations, from faces of young and old to representational and symbolic views of black life.
In the John Adams Building will be a portion of the exhibition titled "The African American Odyssey: Black Business and Family Life at the Turn of the Century in the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection." Only 35 years after the abolition of slavery, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington and Daniel A.P. Murray, a historian and librarian who worked at the Library of Congress for 52 years, planned an award-winning exhibition for the Paris Exposition of 1900. The exhibition included literature about African Americans assembled by Murray, drawings and inventions by blacks accepted by the U.S. Patent Office and a display on African American winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Photographs from the exhibit will be displayed in the Adams Building.
An exhibition catalog, The African American Odyssey, edited by Dr. Ham, prefaced by Dr. Billington and published by the Library, will be available for $19.95 in sales shops in the Jefferson and Madison buildings.