The Howard County
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VOL.2, NO.11
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More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County
Sharing African American heritage
Amassing a collection Burch, who is the director, curator and fundraiser for the museum and center, contributed heavily to them from her own private collection.
5 0 NOVEMBER 2012
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PHOTO BY FRANK KLEIN
By Robert Friedman In 1963, Wylene Burch was living in Berlin, Germany, with her husband, an Army officer, and their two small children. “It was the time of the assassinations of President Kennedy and Medgar Evers and of the civil rights movement. My daughter, DeLace, who was 9 at the time, was old enough to know that something was going on in America,” Burch said. “So I started teaching my children about the civil rights movement and about their African American heritage.” Fifteen years later, Burch and her family moved to Columbia, Md. She knew that African Americans had lived in Howard County for centuries — Maryland was a slave state until 1864 — but there were no institutions or societies here marking their history. “When I came to Howard County in 1978, I noticed the history of African Americans wasn’t being preserved,” she said. “So I began organizing for a museum and cultural center with others in the community.” Burch’s dream of passing on the history of African Americans to future generations — which took permanent hold in those years she was telling her children about their heritage — became a material reality in 1987 with the opening of the Howard County Center of African American Culture. The center, located in a two-story house on Vantage Point Road, features a museum filled with more than 20,000 artifacts highlighting African American life in Howard County and the contributions of African Americans to the nation and the world. The story of racism and slavery is also touched upon in the museum. The center’s collection of more than 10,000 books about and by African Americans, as well as periodicals and audio and visual recordings, are now housed at Howard County Community College. An archival center tracing the history of five Howard County Black families also is part of the center’s library at HCCC.
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ARTS & STYLE Wylene Burch helped found the Howard County Center of African American Culture, contributing thousands of books, historical artifacts and memorabilia she has collected. The center’s more than 10,000 books are now housed at Howard County Community College.
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“I started collecting these things — history, music, arts, artifacts, books — for my children,” she said. Soon her home was filled with boxes of historical artifacts, memorabilia and publications. In her early days in Columbia, she would pack up her car and offer a moveable African American museum and history lesson to schools, churches and community centers around the area. “I love history, and I believe in passing it on, which I did with the traveling museum and I’m now doing at the cultural center,“ said Burch,. ”I’ve always wanted to have a place like this where I could share [my col-
lection] with lots of people,” she said. Once the museum was established, other people started making contributions. “We’re still collecting,” she said. “I just learned that a family in Silver Spring has willed me artifacts for the center.” Among the museum’s intriguing exhibits is one composed of miniature replicas of African American inventions. Burch said she has catalogued some 1,000 inventions by black Americans. These include, among many others, the letter box, golf tee, horseshoe, folding chair, player piano, See HERITAGE, page 27
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