From 1940 through 1970, millions of Black Americans made their way out of the country’s South, drawn by wartime industrial jobs and the desire to escape racial violence and oppression. Much of this mass exodus—known as either the Second Great Migration or the second phase of the larger Great Migration—occurred on Greyhound buses, which were often cramped and segregated but offered the promise of a better future. It’s these “between spaces,” as well as the journeys that transpired on them, that Robert Louis Brandon Edwards—a Cleveland-based historian, artist, and Ph.D. student in preservation at Columbia University—is focused on sharing with others.

As part of his doctorate program, Edwards is restoring a 1947 Greyhound bus and turning it into a mobile museum called the National Museum of the Great Migration. It’s a type of experimental preservation, he says, that isn’t relegated only to buildings, but also includes moving architecture such as cars, trucks, and buses. As opposed to a general collection of exhibits highlighting the Second Great Migration, his project focuses on the moments that occurred within it: the experiences of Black Americans who didn’t have access to trains and couldn’t afford cars for their trips north. “We’ve had museums dedicated to bananas, potatoes, and Spam,” Edwards says. “But we don’t have many—if any—museums dedicated to the Great Migration.”

He first began thinking about the project in 2022 at the start of his Ph.D. program, but it wasn’t until 2024 that Edwards bought the decommissioned bus from a Pennsylvania junkyard. He then had it shipped to Cleveland, where it resides in the parking lot of the city’s historic Greyhound bus station. The property’s new owner, performing arts center Playhouse Square, has provided Edwards with the parking spot as well as office space. Once restored, the bus will be a place where visitors can interact with original objects and learn about Black travelers’ experiences through augmented reality (AR).

The vehicle is one of the few surviving 1947 General Motors PD3751 models in existence, a Streamline Moderne classic featuring the style’s signature horizontal lines, curved forms, and corrugated aluminum side panels—all intended to evoke speed and motion. “The bus is already doing what I wanted it to do, because I’m having conversations about architecture and preservation,” says Edwards.

It’s stories like hers and those of other working-class Black Americans that drive him. “Rosa Parks is cool,” he says. “John Lewis is cool. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass are all cool, and I really appreciate what they’ve done, but Black history isn’t represented by just five stars. It’s about the collective experience.”

The mobile museum will honor this collective experience by examining the interstate bus system as a means of mobility and freedom for Black Americans, as well as a space of discrimination and oppression. To really get a sense of how this duality worked, Edwards has pored over a heap of archival material: seeking out Greyhound advertisements that were printed for both Black and white audiences, listening to transcripts from interviews and oral histories, and even finding records of Black passengers who were arrested for refusing to sit in the bus’s designated “Colored” sections.

Although the bus’s designer, Raymond Loewy, did not incorporate segregation into his original bus drawings, it became a prevalent feature regardless—one that altered the bus’s interior space and social dynamics. Visitors will be able to experience that firsthand by donning a pair of AR goggles, which will transport them right back to a bus in the midcentury era. Once on board, they’ll be given the choice: Do you want to sit in the front of the bus or the back of the bus?

From 2022–2024, Robert Louis Brandon Edwards served as an advisor to the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund on the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza project in Akron, Ohio.