Thank you for joining the African American Civil War Memorial Freedom Foundation July 15 - 18, as we celebrated TEN YEARS of our now, national monument, the Spirit of Freedom Memorial by Ed Hamilton, Sculptor of Louisville, Kentucky.

Special guests included the Honorable James Clyburn, the Honorable Eleanor Holmes Norton, TV personality, Maureen Bunyan, Sculptor Ed Hamilton and several renowned ministers, elected officials and performers.

Over the past decade, the museum staff and volunteers have made contact with more than five thousand families that are descendants of the soldiers whose names are engraved on the Wall of the monument has attracted more than 400,000 tourists and their spending dollars to historic U street. Over the years the museum has obtained the Nation’s largest collection of rare books, artifacts and research material on the African American Civil War soldiers’ legacy of freedom.

We have spent the past ten years promoting the monument and museum for educational research and tourism. During this decade, several new books have been published using the database of names on the monument.  We have also published our own Book of Names that is now available in many libraries such as New York and Mississippi and is available for sale on our website.

There are 209,145 names listed on the Wall of Honor of the memorial. More than eighty percent of these men survived the Civil War to come home and start families, churches schools, farms and factories. Many are buried in unmarked graves without as much as a headstone to mark the place where they rest. We must continue our efforts to locate the descendants and record their stories, store their documents and get their history properly documented. Their history is the history of an America becoming a more perfect Union where all people are equal and able to enjoy all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. The more we know about our history the stronger we are as a people and a Nation