African American Museum of Bucks County to open this spring

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The African American Museum of Bucks County will open at its permanent home in Middletown Township this spring.

Exhibits across four levels of a renovated 18th-century farmhouse will invite visitors to delve into the region’s history, dating back to the Lenape people and focusing on the experiences of Black Americans in the county.

A timeline running throughout the museum tells a story of Bucks County’s Black communities, from the Transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans, to the region’s rich history related to the Underground Railroad, to the Great Migration in the early 1900s.

The need to highlight these stories and facts has grown all the more important in the face of actions such as the removal of the slavery exhibit from the President’s House Site at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, said Linda Salley, president of the African American Museum of Bucks County.

“The importance is that I’m still fighting for us to be, to stay alive, to keep it,” Salley said. “As they’re tearing down our history, I’m tearing it up, I’m building it back up. And I’m sitting there fighting … to replace everything they tore down, so people will know there’s no shame in it.”

Bucks County residents Harvey Spencer Sr. and Millard Mitchell began the museum as a traveling exhibition in 2013. Both Spencer and Mitchell have since passed away, with Salley and other advocates continuing to push the effort forward.

“Millard Mitchell was a self-taught historian, and he had so much history stored up in his home,” she said. “Unfortunately, they had a flood in Yardley, and all of that history was destroyed, but his mind was sharp as a tack, and he shared that history with all of us. Harvey was very passionate, and he also had history. So that’s how we got started.”

Salley said the country’s “horrible” history has to be told so young people understand it. Part of that local history is documenting the existence of slavery in Bucks County, she said.

One wall of the museum displays a list of the names of enslaved people recorded in county census records between the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Salley said that when she first saw the census records those names are drawn from, she saw that the names of the enslaved people were listed in separate books detailing property, next to numbers of livestock and animals.

“I was floored. I was like, what?” she said. “I’m looking at this, and I’m getting furious, and I wasn’t there.”

Alongside those tragedies, she said, the museum also delves into the stories of people who fought back against slavery and racism, including the strong Quaker abolitionist movement in Bucks County before the Civil War.

“I want them to know that Bucks County was a safe haven for African Americans,” she said. “I want them to know that as horrible is American history, American history is terrible, and a lot of people are angry, but what I’m trying to promote is that in in spite of that anger, there’s a whole lot of good that came out of it, a whole lot of good people saved a lot of our people so that they can survive.”

The museum is hosting a free Juneteenth celebration at Mayors Park in Langhorne on June 6. The museum’s opening date has not yet been set.