Kevin Riordan: A local trove of African American history

At the Benson Multi-Cultural History Museum in Lawnside, history is like family. It embraces you.

"Welcome," tour guide Gloria Crews-Pitchford says. "These walls have stories to tell."

And not only the walls. "Everywhere your eye drops," the Rev. James A. Benson observes, "there's an educational experience."

The museum is a floor-to-ceiling showcase for an eclectic collection of artifacts, photographs, books, and other materials, focused primarily but not exclusively on the black experience.

"It's about all of us," Benson, 78, says. "It's for all of us."

A born-and-raised borough resident, longtime pastor, and former jazz bass player, Benson never intended to become a curator, too. The museum grew out of the children's education program at his nondenominational Valley Bible Church on Pine Street in 1985.

After Benson covered classroom walls with newspaper clippings and photographs related to black history, "people started calling it a museum," he recalls. When a local resident donated a vintage Singer sewing machine, "we started putting other things together."

The museum, still in the church, now includes hundreds of objects and thousands of books in its labyrinth of rooms, where photocopied newspaper clippings arranged by subject (including Lawnside history, churches, sports) are affixed to nearly every available surface.

Largely unknown by or ignored by outsiders, the life of an entire community - and an era - was faithfully reported on by publications such as the long-defunct Lawnside Chronicle, whose words are among those finding new readers at the Benson museum.

Faces of the famous and the not-so-famous, of family, friends, and people who otherwise would be forgotten, wait behind clear plastic sleeves to catch a visitor's eye. Headlines speak of matters ordinary and extraordinary, of scholarships awarded, businesses opened, and, more recently, a first-in-history presidency won.

A lectern used by the original Carl Miller Funeral Home - a community institution dating to the 1860s - stands in one room. "Treasures from Ghana," including intricately printed fabrics and other items donated by the late Nana-Kow Bondzie, a Ghanaian who had relatives in Lawnside, fill another.