The Museum of the Black History in Porto Alegre, sometimes called the Black History Museum, is an open-air museum in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, dedicated to giving more visibility to the black community and rescuing the memory of its presence in the city.
The museum does not have a headquarters. As historian Pedro Vargas said, "it is a museum of path, of territory. And it seeks to mark important places for the memory of the black population, which have been erased over time. The museum brings back an almost lost memory of this black population that was also part of the beginning of Porto Alegre. Population that, today, is practically invisibilized." It is the first of its kind in Brazil.
History
The antecedents of the creation of the Black History Museum are in the strengthening of the awareness of the black community and, more specifically, in the Civic Walks carried out in the beginning of the 21st century, idealized by artists, poets and writers connected to the Black Culture Association. The first one took place on May 20, 2001, commemorating the three black dates in the month of May: May 13, day of the abolition of slavery, transformed by the black movement into the National Day of Denunciation against Racism; May 14, date of the execution of the leaders of the Malê revolt of 1835, and May 25, Africa Day. According to Karitha Soares, "the proposal was to walk through the places where black Africans and their descendants built memories, whether through work, plight, cultural expressions, or resistance. The walk went through the Public Market, the Rosário Church, the area of the old jail, Praia Street, the site of the old Pelourinho in the square of the Dores Church, the old Forca Square and others, ending at the Mário Quintana Culture House, where a conversation circle took place.
The museum was first conceived in 2003 by several black social movements, which met at the Museum of Porto Alegre to organize a seminar to create the Afro-Brazilian Reference Center, an entity that came to centralize the demands of the black movements in the capital. Among other things, they demanded greater representation in the cultural heritage of the city, based on the observation that the hundreds of statues, busts, and public monuments in the city did not include blacks, despite their fundamental contribution to the formation and growth of Porto Alegre, and that black memory was being increasingly erased. The idea of the museum thus emerged, as Pedro Vargas said, as a way to revisit and rewrite the city's history, and to claim "civil and political rights of representation of the black ethnic group in the concert of memories and peoples that originated and make Porto Alegre."
After a historical research to identify the places of reference, memory and belonging of black territories in Porto Alegre, led by Professor Iosvaldyr Bittencourt Júnior, in partnership with several griot masters such as Walter Calixto Ferreira, José Alves Bitencourt, Nilo Feijó and Elaine Rodrigues, a project was elaborated to enable its materialization, by a group of artists, historians, journalists, museologists and researchers, all militants of the black movement, where Arilson dos Santos Gomes, Jeanice Dias Ramos, Lorecinda Abraão, Vinícius Vieira, Pedro Rubens Vargas, Ivan Braz, Adriana Santos and Fernanda Carvalho stand out. There was much resistance to overcome in the municipal bureaucracy before the project was accepted.
Approved by the Participatory Budget, the first stage of its implementation was completed in 2011 with the participation of the Afro-Brazilian Reference Center, the coordination of the Angola Janga Working Group and support from the City Hall and the Monumenta Program. The IPHAN guided its execution. In the meantime, the Carris Company organized a bus tour through the city's black territories, passing through most of the places defined in the museum, which due to the great demand by schools and educational projects was extended far beyond the forecast. Meanwhile, courses were given to train monitors to accompany visitors on the museum's route.