He built his collection from travels to Africa and visits to antique shops and estate sales around the U.S. On one wall of the museum hang shackles and hobbles used to restrain slaves, including an iron neck ring with three hooked rods that reach out past the shoulders, designed to slow a runaway slave's passage through dense brush. Another room displays hand tools used by black workers—slave and free—to build America. A basket of cotton is a reminder of the Old South's economic engine. There are advertisements for slave auctions, bills of sale for slaves, and “letters of manumission” that freed a lucky few. The museum also displays the achievements of African Americans in science, the arts, politics, and law.

Anderson constructed his museum in stages, as he scraped together funds. He bought the property in Sandy Spring in 1988, built the slave ship display in 1992, reconstructed a slave cabin in 1995, broke ground for the main museum building in 1999, and finally opened it for visitors in 2004. (His garage is now nearly empty.) He and private donors provided most of the funding, along with $150,000 in grants from the State of Maryland. About 3,000 visitors a year tour the museum, which is open on weekends and by appointment.

One room shows the history of the black community in Sandy Spring. The town was founded in 1728 by Quakers, many of whom refused to own slaves. Free blacks and former slaves gravitated there and were able to buy land and build houses. Sandy Spring also became a stop on the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses and escape routes that helped slaves flee to Canada and freedom.

With all the horrors of slavery and the Jim Crow era that followed, it might be easy for a visitor to leave Sandy Spring discouraged. But that's not how Anderson sees his museum and its meaning. “I think people go away with positive feelings,” he says. “They know it's part of the past, but we have come a far distance, and there is hope for the future.”

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