By Victor Omondi
Elizabeth Meaders, a former Staten Island teacher, has amassed 20,000 items reflecting the African American experience and is now ready to auction them off, according to CBS News.
Speaking to CBS News, Meaders said that she has 14 museums in her home, each dedicated to a distinct era.
Walking through Meader’s house felt like being “enveloped by history spanning the African American experience,” stated CBS2’s Aundrea Cline-Thomas. On his way to the kitchen, Cline-Thomas was shown a photograph of a slave being branded.
Each room reflected a different era, said Meaders. A short bronze statue of Joe Lewis and a pair of Muhammed Ali’s sneaker were displayed in what appeared to be living room. Meaders had been collecting these relics for almost 60 years, stated Cline-Thomas, and there were a whopping 20,000 of them.
Using a teacher’s income, Meaders accumulated the actual artifacts, frequently mortgaging her home to do so.
“There’s never been an auction of a large collection being sold as a collection like this,” noted Arlen Ettinger of Guensey’s Auction House.
The auction will be held at Guernsey’s, with the expectation that a new buyer will maintain the collection intact and in New York City.
“Hey Mayor Adams, come on, New York City with all his greatness does not have a full-blown African American Museum and you got one sitting right here in Staten Island.” Remarked Ettinger.
Meaders made the effort to ensure that Black history was recorded as she saw it being made. She told CBS that she wants her collections to be shown in an African American institution or possibly Barack Obama’s presidential library.
“Everywhere, every day Black history is being made. So, it’s up to us to embrace it an to respect it and to promote it,” Meaders told CBS. “Two million dollars for a baseball card, five million dollars for Marilyn Monroe’s dress – What is the value of the story of a people? That’s the question that this collection is trying to answer.”
The starting price for bidding is $1 million.
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