The Museum of African American History in Boston has laid off three director-level employees, including its chief curator, as leadership grapples with mounting deficits that have shrunk the institution's net assets from $11 million to roughly $9 million in the span of a year. The cuts hit the museum's curatorial, development, and learning and engagement departments, leaving the nonprofit with just seven full-time employees and three part-time workers to run four historic properties spread across Beacon Hill and Nantucket.
According to The Boston Globe, the museum ran a $1.4 million deficit the year before last and followed it with an even steeper $1.8 million shortfall last year, on an annual operating budget of around $3 million. President and CEO Noelle Trent called the layoffs a difficult but necessary cost-cutting decision, telling the paper that the cuts do not change the museum's commitment to its projects, communities, and partners. Trent, who took over as president in June 2023 after seven and a half years directing interpretation, collections, and education at Memphis's National Civil Rights Museum, now oversees the museum's properties on Beacon Hill and Nantucket amid the leanest staffing the institution has seen in years.
A Federal Grant Yanked, Then Restored
Part of the financial strain traces back to a $500,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the museum was informed it had lost in early 2025. The grant had been intended to help develop field trip offerings, outreach, and programming across the museum's historic sites, and its termination came as the Trump administration targeted grant-making agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts and the IMLS. The Boston Globe reports the grant was later restored, though Trent said per the paper that uncertainty about it remains. According to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, its FY 2024 budget request was $294,800,000, including $282,800,000 for programs and administrative costs authorized by the Museum and Library Services Act. The Institute of Museum and Library Services said its FY 2024 programs included funding support for America250-related grants through the six Office of Museum Services programs, released on August 15, 2023.
The museum has faced financial challenges and other setbacks in recent years, including strain dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic that has never fully eased. Angela Tate, who joined in August 2024 as the museum's first-ever chief curator and director of collections after leaving her post as curator of women's history at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, was among those let go. Tate had curated the exhibition Black Voices of the Revolution, which opened in July 2025 at the Abiel Smith School as part of Massachusetts' MA250 semiquincentennial celebrations and incorporated interactive AI technology depicting the daily lives of Revolutionary-era Black Bostonians.
Curatorial Future Left Unclear
Tate said the museum will not have curatorial staff for the foreseeable future, a characterization Trent called inaccurate, saying instead that the museum is revising how it manages its curatorial area. The Boston Globe notes that what happens to curatorial decisions going forward remains unclear, even as the museum says it remains committed to its curatorial work. Trent said she has been assessing and reassessing museum operations as the institution adjusts to what she described as its new reality.
The reduced staffing has already changed how the public can visit. The museum is now closed to the public on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, though it remains open those days for field trips and private events, and is open to general visitors Thursday through Sunday. The Beacon Hill campus centers on the 1806 African Meeting House, a National Historic Landmark and the oldest surviving Black church building in the United States that once served as a recruitment center for the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Nearby stands the museum's Abiel Smith School, built in 1835 as the nation's first public school building constructed exclusively for educating Black children.
Six Decades of Preservation, Now Under Strain
The museum traces its roots to activist and writer Sue Bailey Thurman, who founded it in 1963 — the same year she helped organize the March on Washington — leading to its formal incorporation in 1967 and its acquisition of the African Meeting House in 1972, according to the Boston Women's Heritage Trail. Beyond Boston, the museum also maintains two Nantucket properties: the c. 1827 African Meeting House and the c. 1774 Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House, built by a formerly enslaved Black weaver and kept under continuous Black ownership for nearly two centuries before the museum acquired it. The Boston campus also anchors the city's 1.6-mile Black Heritage Trail, which links 14 pre-Civil War sites from the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common to Smith Court.
The museum's financial squeeze mirrors a broader crisis facing Black cultural institutions nationally. Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History warned local officials this spring that expiring pandemic-era aid was forcing layoffs and reduced hours there as well, as post-pandemic federal and state relief funding dried up across cultural nonprofits throughout 2025 and 2026. For Boston's museum, the challenge now is sustaining decades of preservation work and public programming with a staff cut to its leanest levels in recent memory.
