CHARLESTON, S.C. — A $75 million International African American Museum will be built in South Carolina on Charleston Harbor where tens of thousands of slaves first set foot in the United States.
“There is no better site,” Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said Tuesday, standing on the waterfront tract where the 42,000-square-foot museum will be built in the city where the Civil War began. It’s near where a wharf where slaves left ships once stood.
The site is just down and across the street from the vacant lot where the museum, first proposed 13 years ago, was originally planned.
Riley said that as research for the museum was done, the significance of Gadsden’s Wharf became evident. The wharf was built by Revolutionary War patriot Christopher Gadsden and it’s estimated that 40 percent of African slaves brought to the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries walked across it.
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