IAAM receives $500,000 grant from Fluor Foundation

From left to right: Joseph P. Riley, Jr., IAAM Board Member and former Charleston Mayor; Torrence Robinson, Fluor’s Senior Director of Global Community Affairs and President of the Fluor Foundation; Michael Boulware Moore, IAAM President and CEO; and Brenda Tindal, IAAM Director of Education and Engagement.

As the International African American Museum’s Founders Fund approaches the finish line, it has received a $500,000 pledge from the Fluor Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Fluor Corporation.

Fluor has had a presence in Greenville, South Carolina for decades. The $19 billion company, based in Irving, Texas, has nearly 60,000 employees worldwide.

“Fluor has been a major corporation in South Carolina for more than 80 years and now operates in six continents,” said Michael Boulware Moore, IAAM president and CEO. “While based in Charleston, the International African American Museum will convey critical chapters of history that are relevant to people across the nation and the world, in all of the communities that Fluor serves.”

This leadership investment will be recognized in the African Roots Gallery, which situates Africa and Africans as central to the overarching narrative of the IAAM. Focusing on major regions in the Upper Guinea Coast and West Central Africa, and the diverse ethnicities within these regions that represent the origins of African ancestors in North America, the exhibit will give visitors a picture of the cultures, knowledge and technologies that Africans from these regions brought to the Americas through the forced migration of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

All of the museum’s galleries will be designed as immersive, interactive learning experiences by the team at Ralph Appelbaum Associates. These kinds of exhibits provide visitors with hands-on educational opportunities, one of the museum’s central goals.