The revolution demanded it, even if the keepers of history at the time didn't.
At the height of the movement, there was no market for historic African-American artifacts. Mainstream museums weren't interested in documenting it, and 'if you look at how museums and scholars had interpreted African-American history up until the '60s, it had been very biased and one-sided,' said John Fleming, director of the International African-American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
'The civil rights movement itself sparked a consciousness on the part of black people that they needed to preserve their documents and culture.'
