About The National Museum Of African American History And Culture
Since opening Sept. 24, 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has welcomed nearly 5 million visitors. Occupying a prominent location next to the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the nearly 400,000-square-foot museum is the nations largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history. For more information about the museum, visit nmaahc.si.edu, follow @NMAAHC on , , and Snapchator call Smithsonian information at 633-1000.
Washington Dc: African American History Museum And Culture Private Tour
- E-Ticket
- 2 hr
Meet us and we will give you a private tour and a fantastic taste of the National Museum of African American History and Culture The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. It was established by an Act of Congress in 2003 following decades of efforts to promote and highlight the contributions of African Americans. The museum has collected more than 36,000 artifacts. Your tour guide will focus on important highlights to keep your group engaged and stop them from becoming overwhelmed and losing interest. During the tour, see how the stories, histories, and cultures of African Americans are shaped and informed by global influences. This is not an official Smithsonian tour. Customers booking this tour are paying for UTG Experience’s services and perspective, which is independent of and may not represent the views of the Smithsonian.
Certain Days Dont Require Tickets
The National Museum of African American museum has two seasons: peak and off-peak. Peak is from March-August. Off-peak is from September-February.
During off-peak dates, you can walk up after 10am Monday-Friday and head into the museum without tickets. On peak dates, you can walk up after 1pm Monday-Friday and head into the museum without tickets. Walk-up entry is not available on Saturdays or Sundays during either peak or off-peak dates due to the high demand.
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We Are Excited To Welcome Groups From Around The Country And The World
The National Museum of African American History and Culture welcomes groups of 10 or more to reserve free timed-entry passes. Please be aware we are operating at a reduced capacity for visitation. To help you prepare for your visit, we have provided the following guidance when planning your visit.
- Large groups must form smaller group of 10 to enhance your experience and maximize safety.
- Children ages 16 and younger must be accompanied by an adult at all times.
- One chaperone is required for each group of 10 students.
- Weekdays, Monday through Thursday, are our least crowded days.
- Visits after 2:00 p.m. can be less crowded.
- Visitors are able to enter the museum until 4:00 p.m.
- The museum is open until 5:30 p.m.
Tour Operators
We look forward to welcoming your visitors to Washington, DC. Please keep in mind that we are gradually returning to our previous visitation capacity. We encourage you to review information on our maximum daily group size and entry time when reserving free timed-entry passes.
When Is The Museum Open
The museum will open to the public at 1 PM on September 24 after the opening ceremony, which starts at 10 AM. It will also be open the following day from 7 AM to midnight. Itll be open between 10 AM and 7:30 PM for the first full week and until 10 PM on October 1 and 2 before settling into its normal hours of 10 AM to 5:30 PM.
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So How Do You Get Tickets To Visit The Smithsonian In 2021
- Free timed passes are required for entrance to any of the Smithsonian Museums until July 20. As of July 20, only NMAAHC and National Zoo will require tickets.
- You will be asked to wear a mask if you are not vaccinated and maintain physical distancing
- Tickets are available for groups of 12 or less. Groups larger than 12 people are prohibited. However, you can only book up to 6 tickets at a time. Groups 6-12 will need to make two reservations.
- You will need a ticket for each person, regardless of age.
OVERWHELMED? We offer private Smithsonian museum tours to groups of 5 or less of American History, National Gallery of Art, Natural History, National Archives, Air and Space and National Portrait Gallery! Find out more.
NATIONAL ZOO
Daily 8am – 4pm
Entrance to the National Zoo required timed tickets, and parking passes will need to be reserved in advance as well. While tickets are free, there is a fee to park at the Zoo lot.
PANDAS: Heads up, there will be a second timed ticket needed to visit the Panda exhibit! When you arrive, look for the Panda statues with a QR code to get the ticket link. Tickets are released every hour for that time slot and they go quick. Expect to start refreshing at :29!
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE TICKETS
Wednesday – Sunday 10am-530pm
Even before COVID, this museum required timed tickets at busy times. Tickets are released at 8am each day for the next month 30 days out They sell out within the first few minutes!
With Nmaahc Mobile You Can
- Search for objects from our collection found throughout the Museum
- Explore stories from our inaugural exhibitions
- Watch videos and experience AR features to enhance your visit
- Connect with social media to share your favorite stories
- Plan your visit and explore all 8 levels of the Museum with our floor-by-floor maps
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How To Get Tickets Now
The new visitation policy change takes effect starting in January 2019. For the rest of December 2018, visitors can enter the museum without passes on weekdays after 1 p.m. There are no advance timed-entry passes available for December, but same-day passes can be obtained online, every morning beginning at 6:30. To handle holiday crowds, the museum is extending its hours of operation December 26 through December 29, remaining open until 7:30 p.m. And don’t forget, NMAAHC, like all the other Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo, will be closed on Christmas Day, December 25.
It’s Now Possible To Visit The Smithsonian’s African American History Museum Virtually
From
The NMAAHC launched a “Searchable Museum” this week, translating its archives and stories into an interactive digital experience. Alan Karchmer/Courtesy of the Smithsonianhide caption
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Anyone who’s been to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will speak of its elevator ride through time, which takes visitors from the present day to the 15th century and kicks off the first exhibit, Slavery & Freedom. With the launch of a new virtual platform, visitors can now travel on the elevator down to that exhibit without ever leaving their homes.
The Searchable Museum, launched Thursday, transforms the artifacts, stories, and interactive experiences of the physical exhibit into a digital platform where museumgoers can take it in at their own pace.
Eventually, the museum plans to bring all of its exhibits online. The next exhibit, Making a Way Out of No Way, will go online this spring.
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived but if faced with courage, need not be lived again, ” echoes Angelou’s voice as a video plays, showing images from the past 600 years of Black history.
Unlike other Smithsonian museums, the NMAAHC has required timed-entry passes to enter the site almost exclusively since it opened in 2016. Though these timed tickets are still free of charge, they can be snapped up pretty quickly: Many tickets for December have already been claimed.
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Where Is The Nmaahc
The NMAAHC is located on the National Mall at 1400 Constitution Avenue NW. It is between Constitution Avenue and Madison Drive, next to the American History Museum and the Washington Monument.
The NMAAHC is just across the street from the starting points of our National Mall and All in One Walking Tours!
There are many ways to get there and it is a short walk from many other destinations on the National Mall. We recommend this link for specific directions to the museum:
The nearest Metro Stations are Federal Triangle and Smithsonian It is also a short walk from Metro Center The Circulator Bus drops at the Washington Monument, just across the street from the museum. For more information on navigating the Metro, check out our blog post HERE.
Alternatively, many of the hop on hop off buses have a stop nearby to the NMAAHC.
Check Out The Online Portal
The museum opened a free-to-use web portal that helps people explore issues of race, racism and racial identity called Talking About Race in 2020. It examines how forces surrounding racial identity shape every aspect of society in the US, from the economy and politics to the broader culture. It has videos, online exercises, scholarly articles and over 100 multi-media resources tailored for educators, parents and caregivers and individuals committed to racial equality. The portal is free and does not require a registration or sign-up to use.
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Start With The History Gallery
You enter the main exhibit by heading down to subterranean three levels of concourse galleries. Symbolically it feels like descending into the hold of slave ship, with each subsequent step taking you deeper into the African-American legacy.
Theres so much information here that you could literally spend days absorbing the information.
Galleries include shackles, a slave auction block and Ku Klux Klan robes. A statue of Thomas Jefferson is flanked with bricks listing the humans he owned. Its all offered factually with extensive documentation, all of which makes the impact all the stronger.
But for many the emotional pivot of the entire museum is the casket of Emmett Till Jr. Visitors line up as theyre at a funeral home visitation to pay honors to the 14-year-old boy, who was brutally murdered in northern Mississippi. His mothers courageous decision to hold an open-casket funeral in Chicago, shocked the nation when images were published in Ebony magazine. Tills horrific murder, scholars believe, was the start of the modern Civil Rights movement, and for that we still owe Mamie Till our gratitude.
Now, decades later, its still a heart-rending experience. The curators included a contemplation area for reflection. Take a moment to do just that.
Finally, the galleries touch on modern history with election of Barack Obama and the start of the Black Lives Matter movement.
When you step back outside, youll feel like youve taken a journey. In reality, you have.
African American Museums Same
Like tickets to a hot concert tour, free same-day passes to the National Museum of African American History and Culture were snapped up in minutes Monday morning, the day the museum debuted a Web-based same-day-ticket system instead of having people line up in person.
The museum distributed 880 free passes, grouped in 30-minute time slots between 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. The tickets became available at 6:30 a.m., and by 6:34 the banners saying unavailable and sold out covered every time slot. The passes represented about 10 percent of the 8,700 distributed for the day.
More than 643,000 people have visited the Smithsonians newest museum since it opened Sept. 24.
The museum announced the change to its same-day policy last week, saying the colder weather was the reason for eliminating the in-person line. Every weekday since opening, people had lined up along 14th Street, often by the hundreds, for the chance to obtain passes when staff began distributing them at 9:15 a.m. Often visitors lined up before dawn to ensure entry.
The change surprised Robin Choi, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Howard University. Her classmates had been successful nabbing passes by lining up by 8:30 the switch to online caught her off guard.
Im not super bummed, she said. Im fortunate enough to live here, so I can come back.
Its a monumental experience. Its worth the lines, worth the wait, said Tahani Cooper, a retail fashion manager in New York.
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How To Get Free Tickets To The National Museum Of African American History & Culture
The Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September of 2016. It is an amazing museum that is worth a visit on on any trip to Washington, DC. That said, its still very new and very popular, so unlike other museums on the National Mall, you need a free ticket if you want to go. Its not difficult to get one but you will have to wake up early.
The Only Exceptions The Zoo And The National Museum Of African American History And Culture
Visitors will no longer need to reserve a timed-entry pass to check out most of the Smithsonian museums starting on Tuesday, July 20. The two exceptions are the National Zoo and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which already required free tickets prior to the pandemic. While the Zoo will continue to scan passes for general admission, youll no longer need a separate reservation to visit our ever-popular, giant baby panda prince, Xiao Qi Ji.
If youve already reserved a timed-entry pass for a date after the policy goes into effect, feel free to scrap the ticket. Institutions will no longer be scanning passesvisitors can pop into a museum whenever they wish. In addition to the repeal of reservations, museums on the National Mall will be returning to their pre-pandemic hours of 10 AM to 5:30 PM.
The Smithsonian will continue to reopen its spaces throughout July and August. The Freer Gallery of Art and National Museum of African Art started welcoming visitors today, and the Air and Space Museum and Smithsonian Castle will open at the end of the month.
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How To Get Tickets To The Smithsonians African American History Museum
Excitement for the National Museum of African American History and Culture has been so strong that a month before it opened, the Smithsonian created a ticketing system for the first several months of visitors. Passes to the museumwhich, like all other Smithsonian branches, is free to enterhave been reserved through late October, and the museum is currently offering passes for November and December.
The museum, which opens September 24 with a ceremony at which President Obama is expected to cut the ribbon, represents the completion of a goal first set out more than a century ago when a group of black Civil War veterans in DC proposed a national museum celebrating African-American contributions to the countrys history. The 28,500 tickets made available for the opening weekend were snapped up in less than an hour when the Smithsonian made the first batch available.
Excited to visit this new museum but havent made a reservation yet? Heres what you need to know about how to get inside:
Smithsonian National Museum Of African American History And Culture Is The Hottest Ticket In Town
May 7, 2017 at 12:00a.m.
AP Travel Editor
The hottest ticket in Washington, D.C., right now? Its for the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture, where thousands of tickets are snapped up each month within minutes of being released, a full seven months after the museum opened.
The 750 passes released online each day at 6:30 a.m. are gone within 15 to 30 minutes. When 105,000 tickets were released April 3 for visits in July, they were all claimed in just over two hours.
The next batch of reserve-ahead tickets will be released soon and a similar demand is expected.
We thought the numbers would abate but they have not, said the museums deputy director, Kinshasha Holman Conwill.
In addition, she said, the museums dwell time is off the charts.
Typically people spend 45 minutes to two hours visiting a museum, but many of our visitors spend four to six hours. Then they say, Theres no way I can see this in one day, Im coming back.
Abby Kavner, a UCLA professor, got her same-day tickets on an April trip to Washington by going online exactly at 6:30 a.m. and pressing buttons like a maniac until she got through. It felt like I won the lottery, she recalled.
The 300 same-day walk-up passes handed out onsite each day at 1 p.m. also usually disappear within 15 minutes.
Attendance from the museums Sept. 24 opening through April was expected to exceed 1.5 million once all data is compiled.
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How Do You Get Nmaahc Tickets
The easiest way for visitors to obtain free daily passes is with a smart phone, since almost everyone will have one when they are traveling. You can also use a computer if you have one. The process is exactly the same, but on a different screen.
When you reserve passes on your phone print at home will be the only delivery option. This is a little misleading, as you dont actually have to print the tickets, you can show them on your phone when you arrive. After you check out, check your email and youll see the tickets. Just bring those with you on your phone at your assigned time and have fun!
Coming to Washington, DC and want us to show you around?Trip Hacks DC was founded by Rob, a veteran tour guide in the Nations Capital. Trip Hacks DC provides tips, tricks and travel hacks for planning your trip and guided tours to show you around once you get here. Our tours are family and school group friendly and our guides specialize in the major Washington, DC sites. and to book your tour here today! Feel free to contact us if you have any tour questions.
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