In Washington, D.C., thousands gathered on the National Mall Saturday as the country’s first black president helped dedicate the National Museum of African American History and Culture. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama joined the daughter of an enslaved person, 99-year-old Ruth Bonner, ringing a bell to signal the opening of the museum. The 400,000-square-foot museum will house some 37,000 artifacts, including relics from a slave ship, a shawl owned by Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till’s casket, shards of glass from the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, a dress owned by Rosa Parks, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves. President Obama said the museum helps to tell a richer and fuller story of who Americans are.

President Barack Obama: “By knowing this other story, we better understand ourselves and each other. It binds us together. It reaffirms that all of us are America, that African-American history is not somehow separate from our larger American story, it’s not the underside of the American story, it is central to the American story.”