Cleveland-based artist, historian, and preservationist Robert Louis Brandon Edwards is transforming a 1947 Greyhound bus he rescued from a Pennsylvania junkyard into a traveling Museum of the Great Migration. The bus, designed by Raymond Loewy and originally operating in the Great Lakes region, will feature virtual reality exhibitions highlighting the experiences of African Americans who moved from the rural South to the North, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. Edwards, who is pursuing doctoral studies in historic preservation at Columbia University, is partnering with Cleveland nonprofit Playhouse Square and hopes to have the bus on the road within a year.
The project matters because it creates the first museum entirely dedicated to the Great Migration, a transformative period that reshaped American industry, urbanism, art, food, music, and culture. By repurposing a historic Greyhound bus—a vehicle that both enabled Black mobility and exposed passengers to Jim Crow-era harassment—Edwards expands the field of historic preservation to include spaces central to the Black experience. The museum also draws attention to the decline of Greyhound terminals, including the Cleveland station designed by William Strudwick Arrasmith, which is closing and will be converted into a performance venue.