Community Curation
Share Your Story
The African American community has a rich history of storytelling and the Community Curation platform invites all to honor that tradition in an innovative way.
By sharing the images and stories that make up your own history—personal, community, or organizational—you’ll help the Museum fulfill its goal of painting a more complete picture of the American story.
Below, we offer a few tips on how to get started. Already know what you want to say? Please review and accept our Terms and Conditions, then create your account to get started.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Community Curation Platform supports most image formats—.jpeg, .png, and .tiff–so if the photo you’d like to upload is saved on your device, you can easily share the file on our site.
Headlines are the first things people see when they come across your story–you want them to serve as a good incentive for readers to engage with what you’ve shared. The best headlines are catchy, but truthful. Short and active, but easy to understand. Try to avoid simply naming people in the photo or trying to tell the entire story in your headline—remember, you want to give readers something to look forward to in your post.
We don’t want to tell you how to share your own history, but there are a few questions that can help you tell the best version of the story you’re trying to tell. Those questions can include: Who is in this photo? What are they doing? When was it taken? Where was this photo taken? Why is this significant to American history? Does this relate to a specific moment in African American history?
Tags help us organize the content users upload into broad categories that help us see how our individual stories connect. You can use up to five tags on each of your posts, so be sure to think broadly when you’re formulating a tag. For example, if your story is about your experience as a student activist at Fisk University in the 1960s, you could tag your post: HBCUs, Colleges and Universities, Fisk University, activism, and, Civil Rights Movement.
Once you’ve uploaded your image, perfected a headline, shared your story, added tags and double checked your spelling, you should be ready to publish your piece. At this point, you’ll have the option of saving your post so you can share it later or publishing right away. Saving it keeps it in our system, but publishing it allows the public to read what you’ve written. Don’t forget to post your story on social media! Sharing your story helps us grow our community.
Ready to get started? Sign up for account and upload an image now !
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