After years of financial hardship and stalled efforts, two longstanding Detroit cultural institutions are uniting to ask voters in Wayne and Oakland counties to support a joint operating millage in the Nov. 3 election.
The Detroit Historical Society and Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History on Tuesday launched the “Yes to Our Story” campaign, a proposal seeking a 10-year, 0.2 mill levy in Wayne and Oakland counties. The tax would amount to $30 per year for the owner of a home with an average value of $300,000, Historical Society President and CEO Elana Rugh and Wright Museum President and CEO Neil Barclay said at a news conference.
In return, residents of both counties would receive free admission to the Wright Museum and the Historical Society, which operates the Detroit Historical Museum in Midtown and the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle. Currently, only small children and museum members receive free admission.
Additionally, the millage would cover free transportation for students and seniors, new curriculum and training for teachers and the publicly-owned collections for both museums would be permanently protected. Specific details on who would provide transportation are still being discussed, Rugh and Barclay said.
Rugh said the Yes to Our Story proposal would bring financial stability to both museums while allowing the institutions to focus on what they do best–preserving local and Black history while ensuring everyone can experience it.
“You can’t get that feeling from a screen,” Rugh said. “You get it by standing in the place where history becomes real. And that’s why these museums aren’t just amenities; they’re classrooms. They are repositories of memory, and they belong to all of us.”
Founded in 1965, the Wright Museum is the second largest African American museum in the country following the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. Meanwhile, the Historical Society was founded in 1921, with the Historical Museum founded in 1928 to preserve the people, places and events that shape metro Detroit. The two institutions collectively hold more than 300,000 artifacts.
Barclay stressed that the millage will allow the Wright Museum and the Historical Society to have a more prosperous and unified future. Both museums have been preserving the region’s history for decades on budgets that were never stable, he said.
“This measure changes that,” Barclay said. “It keeps our doors open and free. And it puts our programs in front of more students, more teachers in every community from Detroit to Redford to Pontiac, Birmingham and countless others, on average of about $30 a year, less than $3 per month. No family in Wayne or Oakland County will ever be priced out of knowing and celebrating their own history.”
If the millage doesn’t pass, the museums aren’t sure what operations will look like moving forward, Rugh told BridgeDetroit, saying that there will be “tough decisions to make.”
“Things would change for sure,” she said. “We can’t keep going the way that we are. Both institutions are running a deficit budget right now, so we don’t have reserves to support it for much longer.”
However, Rugh and Barclay are staying positive. The museums plan to spend the next three months promoting the millage by using social media, billboards, and canvassing.
“It is going to be a quick and furious campaign to get us across the finish line,” Rugh said. “We are optimistic that folks will come out and support this.”
Revenue challenges
The Yes to Our Story campaign comes two years after the Michigan House of Representatives passed legislation allowing the Historical Society and Wright Museum to establish operating millage rates. House Bill 4177, or the History Museum Authorities Act, would have allowed counties to establish historical museum authorities to provide funding support for historical museums owned by the city of Detroit, including the Wright and the Detroit Historical Society. The bill also passed the state Senate, but was stuck in limbo after a clerical error kept it from reaching the governor’s desk. But efforts to sign the bill into law ended last month when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed it and eight other long-stalled bills.
Last month, the Oakland County Board of Commissioners and the Wayne County Commission created a joint public authority called the Southeast Michigan Public Historical Museum Authority to put a millage on the ballot without approval from the Michigan Legislature.
The Historical Society and Wright Museum have struggled for years to keep up with basic operating costs and have been advocating since 2019 for a joint millage.
During a Detroit City Council budget hearing in March, revenue remained a challenge for the Historical Society, as it currently operates with a “small” budget deficit. The museum received a $2 million budget allocation for the 2026 fiscal year and received the same amount for 2027.
However, $350,000 in grants were clawed back as federal funding priorities have shifted away from arts and culture, with some of the funding being restored through state allocations.
Funding is still needed for capital improvements between the three city-owned facilities it operates, including improving the electricity supply and repairing the design studio inside the 175-year-old Carriage House, which is where many exhibits are built, maintained, and stored.
But the Historical Society’s revenue is growing. The institution saw a 26% increase in revenue over the last three years due in part to paid memberships, which reached an all-time high this year with about 5,000 members.
For the Wright Museum, instability in state funding priorities led to the museum using lines of credit and its operating reserves to maintain programs that were under contract. In addition, the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives means that that museum cannot pursue grants geared toward the Black community specifically.
However, the Wright Museum’s budget is $3.3 million in the fiscal year that began July 1, an increase in the $2.6 million from the prior fiscal year. The museum is also seeing a boost in attendance thanks to its viral social media videos.
An effort to preserve local history
The millage is also receiving support from Alisha Bell, D-Detroit, who chairs the Wayne County Commission. When she was a child, her mother often took her to the Wright Museum’s former location on Frederick Street.
“This museum and the Historical Museum are the two wonderful things that we have not only in Detroit and Wayne County, but in this state,” she said at the news conference. “This initiative is important because we have to preserve our history. The importance of cultural institutions is the importance of a region.”
District 3 Council Member Scott Benson, a vocal advocate for the city’s cultural institutions and a trustee for the Wright Museum, called the two museums “regional assets.”
“That is the magic of civic architecture and public space,” he said. “It bridges geographic divides, breaks down social barriers, and unites us as a broader, more cohesive regional community. These places are worth fighting for because they anchor us during turbulent times. They ground us in the present, and they inspire us toward what we can achieve when we build together.”
Despite voters recently turning down public safety and education millages in Oakland and Wayne counties during the August primary, Rugh and Barclay are optimistic about the proposal. Rugh pointed out that Metro Detroit communities previously supported millages for other institutions like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Zoo. That’s why the museums decided to set the proposal at 0.2 mills because they felt it was the most affordable, Rugh said.
“It’s a modest ask,” Barclay said. “It’s also an important time in both the history of this city and of the region to have these institutions preserved. It will send a message not just in Southeast Michigan, but nationally and internationally about how important this region believes its contributions to history, particularly to American history is, and that we recognize that and we support that.”