National Great Blacks In Wax Museum

The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum is a wax museum in Baltimore, Maryland, featuring prominent African-American and other Black historical figures. It was established in 1983, in a downtown storefront on Saratoga Street. The museum is at 1601 East North Avenue in a renovated firehouse, a Victorian mansion, and two former apartment dwellings that provide nearly 30,000 square feet (3,000 m2) of exhibit and office space. The exhibits feature over 100 wax figures and scenes, including: a full model slave ship exhibit which portrays the 400-year history of the Atlantic Slave Trade, an exhibit on the role of youth in making history, and a Maryland room highlighting the contributions to African American history by notable Marylanders. The museum's co-founder, Dr. Joanne Martin, describes the importance of preserving Black history in this way, stating: "Everything else, it seems like a movie if you don't have a sense of exactly what people were fighting against."