The DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago, founded in 1961 by Margaret Burroughs and a group of local artists and educators, is one of the first museums in the country built specifically to collect and preserve African-American history and culture. The film walks through its galleries and exhibits, tracing a chronology that starts on the shores of Africa and moves through slavery, migration, and the twentieth century. Along the way it stops on individual lives: Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot's license, the Tuskegee Airmen who flew combat missions in World War II, Major Robert Lawrence, selected as the first Black astronaut, and Harold Washington, Chicago's first Black mayor. Curators and museum voices frame the collection around two questions the institution keeps returning to: what is American about Americans, and what will visitors tell their children about this history. The film stays close to the museum's own displays and artifacts rather than outside archival footage, letting the building's exhibits carry the story.