Atlanta businessman Michael Boulware Moore speaks to members of the media Friday at the site of a planned 75 million International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C. Moore, the great-great grandson of the slave Robert Smalls who commandeered a Confederate steamship and sailed it to Union forces during the Civil War, was named Friday as the first president of the museum.
Atlanta businessman Michael Boulware Moore speaks to members of the media Friday at the site of a planned 75 million International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C. Moore, the great-great grandson of the slave Robert Smalls who commandeered a Confederate steamship and sailed it to Union forces during the Civil War, was named Friday as the first president of the museum. Credit: AP Photo

CHARLESTON, S.C. — The great-great-grandson of a slave who commandeered a Confederate ship and took it to Union forces blockading the South Carolina coast is the new president and CEO of the planned $75 million International African American Museum in Charleston.

Museum officials announced on Friday that Atlanta businessman Michael Boulware Moore, who has deep family roots in South Carolina, will head the museum, which officials hope will open in late 2018.

Moore is a direct descendant of Robert Smalls, who made history by commandeering the steamboat Planter in 1862. Smalls later went on to become a South Carolina congressman during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.

The announcement was made at the planned site of the museum, the location of a former wharf on the Cooper River where tens of thousands of slaves first set foot in the United States.

It was on the Cooper River on a foggy spring night more than 150 years ago that Smalls commandeered an ammunition ship, steamed upriver to pick up family and friends, and then slipped past five Southern batteries in Charleston Harbor.