ANDRIA HALL, CNN ANCHOR: February is Black History Month in the United States, but the month usually lasts just 28 days. So a woman in Baltimore has come up with an unusual way to preserve African- American culture and display it all year long. A look now at a one- of-a=kind wax museum.</s>JOANNE MARTIN, GREAT BLACKS IN WAX MUSEUM: When I knew that there is an America that needs to embrace the stories of all of it's people, then it became and it becomes absolutely clear that a Great Blacks in Wax Museum was needed. We have a General Colin Powell, we have Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Billy Holiday and Eubie Blake. Visitors that visit the museum will find a museum that deals with over 5,000 years of history going back to the time before Christ, because African-American history does not begin with slavery. We have Charles Drew, who made tremendous inroads into the field of blood storage. We have Bessie Coleman, the first licensed black female pilot in America. Madam C.J. Walker, she became the first female millionaire of any color in America. We have Granville T. Woods. He developed the transmitter for the telephone. We have Mary Eliza Mahoney. She was this first black professional nurse in America. In the making of our wax figures, we use a team of sculptures. And it's a very specialized art. Hair-weaving is an art. Just getting the tones right for the skin colors is an art. The eyes are made of glass and the teeth are made of the same thing that false teeth are made from. The clothes on many of our wax figures are the actual clothing of the people who are depicted in wax. We did the slave ship exhibit mainly because of the insight of my husband, Rafael (ph) Martin. He says that none of what we do makes any sense if we don't have some frame of reference. There were people who were willing to hang onto life when it might have been expedient to just give up. If we can survive much of what we faced on slave ships, we can certainly survive the challenges of modern-day America.
Baltimore Woman Creates 'Blacks in Wax' Museum