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-55- National Museum of American History As currently organized, Afro-American materials within the Museum of American History are found in a variety of divisional collections and include slave documents, craft items, advertising, political memorabilia, photographs and fine arts, and objects with such associations as the Civil Rights Movement, Black athletes and entertainers, and Afro-American coiled basketry. An index to the Museum's Afro-American holdings is being prepared for publication as both a scholarly finding tool and a popular guide to Black history. Future collecting will build on the Museum's most significant collections and will attempt to replace loaned objects in the current exhibitions; the Museum will cooperate with the Anacostia Museum in organizing both regional and national conferences to discuss the types of materials the Smithsonian ought to collect in order to support, rather than compete with, other Afro-American institutions. In the last year and a half the Museum has produced 56 public programs on topics of special interest to Afro-Americans, including two-day conferences as well as performances, concerts, colloquia, lectures, films, and demonstrations; in addition, the Museum has developed a special outreach program in which a staff member speaks about the "Field to Factory" exhibition and schedules special tours for Black community groups and has taken performances of Black musical traditions, developed originally for presentation in the Museum, to some 25 local, regional, and more distant Afro-American institutions. Generally speaking, future Afro-American public programming at the Museum will continue along these lines at an increased pace, augmented by possibilities afforded by the recent acquisition of the Duke Ellington Collection and other opportunities in Black music. National Museum of Natural History The National Museum of Natural History acknowledges that in its general programming insufficient attention has been paid to specific Afro-American interests. For instance, the Museum's special exhibitions over the last several years, selected without regard to their appeal to various constituencies, have included broadly-based presentations on a wide variety of the world's cultures but none relating to that of the Afro-Americans. Like the National Museum of African Art, the Natural History Museum has strong collections in African material culture which could form the basis of exhibitions which would have special relevance to Afro-Americans interested in their heritage. In that regard, the Museum recognizes that the present exhibits in the Africa Hall could be substantially improved to enhance their appeal through new labels and text, and possibly video tapes, which would discuss relationships between African material culture and Afro-American traditions. In the meanwhile, the Museum has produced a wide array of public programming, such as lectures and films, which have had special interest for the Afro-American community, and ideas abound for the development of additional substantive programs. National Portrait Gallery The Portrait Gallery's collections contain a rich variety of portraits in all media of notable Afro-Americans throughout the nation's
