The center is located on the site of the former Avery Normal Institute in the Harleston village district at 125 Bull Street in Charleston, South Carolina.

This historic secondary school trained Black students for professional careers and leadership roles, and served as a hub for Charleston’s African-American community from 1865 to 1954.

The Avery Research Center Archives currently hold over six thousand primary- and secondary-source materials that document the history, traditions, legacies, and influences of African Americans.

Cardozo campaigned to construct a permanent building for the school, and he persuaded the AMA’s traveling secretary, E. P. Smith, to seek $10,000 from the late Reverend Charles Avery’s estate in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

For this reason, many Avery graduates, such as Septima Clark, taught in one-room schoolhouses all over South Carolina, especially in the rural areas of the Lowcountry region surrounding Charleston.

[4] Subsequent Avery principals, such as Morrison A. Holmes, continued the school’s tradition of teacher training and classical education, though the instructors were white missionaries rather than local African Americans like the Cardozo brothers.

Their purpose was to obtain the former Avery Normal School buildings and establish an archives and museum dedicated to preserving African-American history and culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

The Avery Institute’s first president was the Honorable Lucille S. Whipper, a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from Charleston County.

Out of the planning grant came the concept of a research center as a cooperative project of the Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture and the College of Charleston.

[3][2] In 1985, The Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture was established as part of the academic program of the College of Charleston.

Each year, the Avery Research Center staff develops exhibitions from its archival materials, art, and rare manuscript collections.

Event spaces in the Avery Research Center building include the McKinley Washington Auditorium, as well as various other exhibition galleries and classrooms.