Maryland's New African-American Heritage Museum

The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture is a "$34 million attraction that opens today at Pratt and President streets. And it clearly resonated with the lead architects, African-Americans Gary Bowden of RTKL Associates in Baltimore and Philip Freelon of the Freelon Group in Durham, N.C." The building is "colorful, upbeat, playful, instantly identifiable." This second-largest African-American heritage museum has exhibits that "simply tell what happened, in a straightforward way. An exhibit on lynching can be found right next to an exhibit on churches. That's how it was in life, and that's how it is here."