Housed in a renovated former school building, the Black World History Wax Museum is a multimedia educational and cultural center that aims to present and interpret American history through Missouri's rich black heritage. The museum's centerpiece is a restored log cabin, built as a slave family home in the 1830s.

The remainder of the collection features murals, artifacts, historic documents, memorabilia as well as wax figures in authentic historical dress of African Americans with Missouri ties. Among the famous figures portrayed are William Wells Brown, a former slave and anti-slavery spokesman, George Washington Carver, a former slave who became an inventor, botanist and educator, Elijah P. Lovejoy, a white abolitionist newspaper editor of St. Louis who was killed defending the right to publish anti-slavery viewpoints, the Reverend John Berry Meacham, a former slave who educated other former slaves on a boat on the Mississippi River to circumvent Missouri laws of the 1840s that prohibited teaching blacks, and Dred and Harriet Scott, slaves who argued for their freedom in a famous case at St Louis' Old Courthouse.

From the Black World History Wax Museum, visit the Old Courthouse at North Fourth Street where the Scott's fought for freedom, Scott Joplin House on Delmar Street, Washington University Gallery of Art in Steinberg Hall at Forsyth and Skinner boulevards and DeMenil Mansion and Museum at DeMenil Place