African American Museum, St. Martinville

The museum sits in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on New Market Street, near Evangeline Oak Park. Its subject is the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana in the mid-1700s, slavery, the community of free people of color and Reconstruction. Parish tourism calls it one of two museums of record for St. Martin Parish. At the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site across town, reproduction slave quarters stand on a farmstead of about 1800; the museum gives the wider account of the Africans, enslaved people and free people of color behind them.

The Shackles of Memory is a fourteen-panel exhibit, and a French translation is available at the reception desk. A mural by Dennis Paul Williams is among the displays. Danielle Fontenette directed the museum from 1999 to 2019 and still leads it. A 2018 special exhibit presented Black Mardi Gras and the Mardi Gras Indians with costumes.

In February 2025 the museum ran Black History Month programs: film screenings on Friday evenings, children's storytime on Saturday mornings, and genealogy sessions where families shared their roots. For that month it turned to local history, hanging paintings of descendants of Black figures from St. Martinville and showing interviews with Black residents about their families. Call (337) 394-2233 before driving to confirm hours.