The Judith Wraggs Chase, Louise Alston Graves Old Slave Mart Museum and Library in Charleston, South Carolina is a veritable "treasure chest" of artifacts, arts, crafts, heirlooms, antiquities, photographs, documents, realia, ephemera and material culture that speaks to the origins, travels and history of Americans of African descent. Only a very small portion of the estimable thousands of artifacts in the collection and library were ever on display in the Old Slave Mart Museum, America's oldest slavery museum, located in historic Charleston between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers in South Carolina. However, a study of the archives and catalogues within the Chase treasury of arts, artifacts and antiquities is a passport to "material" understanding about the links from Africa and America......and the lessons learned there from.

Overlapping the latter years of the Chase treasure, Smithsonian trained African-American scholar Carroll Greene was in search of a few family heirlooms only to discover their passing to extinction. Fear that history would not preserve African-American culture as it so meticulously would European and western cultures, Carroll Greene commenced the focused task of creating a “purpose built” collection of African-Americana to span the total history of the African American experience of over 350 years (see full "Greater Acacia Collection" Historical Journey) The “purpose” of “building” The Acacia Collection was direct and simple... education to articulate the true history of African-Americans in order to build a “Bridge of Understanding”. The assimilation of The Acacia Collection with the historic Judith Wraggs Chase, Louise Alston Graves Charleston Old Slave Mart Collection to establish the Greater Acacia Collection is the single most formidable anchor to the world’s oldest, largest, and most comprehensive “Bridge of Understanding” in the service of educating mankind about the Africa-American experience.

Knowledge about just one item in The Acacia Collection can completely change the stereotypes and misbeliefs about the African-American experience. Whether a hand carved funeral vase, a matchstick purse, a patchwork quilt or a child’s African hut savings bank.....artifacts tell the true history to create new enlightenment that builds better understanding. This knowledge of true history and understanding is a means to set us free from all past misunderstanding.

Imagine an exhibition of select Acacia Collection artifacts in and around Africa to introduce the shared, yet separate journeys to liberation.

Imagine a display of Acacia Collection material culture in European capitals where the colonial slave trade built their wealth, power and influence... on the back of locks and chains.

Imagine traveling exhibits of select Acacia antiquities from university campus to university campuses across America to demonstrate the unique ingenuity of Americans of African descent who survived the most brutal of human conditions only to remain resilient contributors to the elevated American way of life.

This is a real “Bridge of Understanding”.