Welcome to the Not Old Better Podcast.

It's time for this week's featured guest on the Not Old Better Podcast.

Not long ago the Smithsonian Institute began assembling artifacts that will help tell the 400

year story of African Americans and their lives here in the United States.

Director Lonnie Bunched, the National Museum of African American History and Culture

involved from the start collecting thousands of artifacts.

We have started with zero objects.

We've now collected nearly 25,000 artifacts from all over the country.

Ground was broken for the museum in 2012,

and the grand opening,

scheduled for September 24, 2016 is right on track.

And workers have put final touches in place for the building that sits on the National Mall.

Meanwhile, Michelle Gates Morrissey and other curators have assembled artifacts that reflect periods of African American history.

The museum acquired almost 40 items belonging to Harriet Tubman.

In the mid 1800s, she helped hundreds of African American slaves reach freedom in the north

through the secret route known as the Underground Railroad.

The museum also received a shawl that was once given to Tuppman.

The shawl that was given to her by Queen Victoria, who had invited her to come to the Queen's Jubilee, which she had declined,

but she had given her the shawl as a recognition of who she was and what she had accomplished.

These slave shackles make the horrors of slavery real.

Director Lani Bunch says these painful chapters of the history of slave life must be told.

That on the one hand will make you angry about what happened to people.

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