No one should miss it!
The new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) was inaugurated Saturday on the Mall in the shadow of the monument to George Washington, who was a slave-owner. Here is the full video of the inauguration ceremony:
My family came to America well after slavery had been abolished: early 1890s. I suppose my parents could have claimed it was all over before we got here, so it has nothing to do with us. But that is not what they did or what the new museum allows anyone to do. It’s tagline, #APeoplesJourney #ANationsStory, betrays the intent: no matter who you are, no matter when your ancestors arrived on these shores, you have a relationship not only to slavery but also to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. These were nation-shaping events, as much as the Revolution, industrialization, the World Wars, or Vietnam.
The museum is a 3D multi-media display of a thousand vignettes, illustrated with objects, music, and graphics that confound over-simplification and stereotyping. Who remembers that slavery was once neither linked to race nor a life-time status? Who knew of the 1741 rebellion of blacks and whites in New York City? Who realizes that both George Washington and his British adversaries viewed blacks as vital to their war plans? It wasn’t only Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the revolt. Seven hundred spent the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge. Who thinks, when we look at the difference in incomes between blacks and whites today, about the 250 years in which the latter did not pay the former for their labor, which generated a significant portion of the nation’s wealth?
America is founded on a contradiction: all people are created equal is the founding creed, but many (not only blacks but women and the unpropertied) were not treated that way. To his credit, Chief Justice Roberts focused his remarks at the inauguration on three landmark Supreme Court decisions: Dred Scott v Sandford (1857), Plessy v Ferguson (1896), Brown v Board of Education (1954). The first held that blacks could not be citizens, the second upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation. Only in the third did the Court rule in a way that today we recognize as just by declaring segregated education unconstitutional. Racial “isolation” of schools nevertheless remains a worsening problem.
President Bush in his remarks focused on just this capacity for change, for correcting mistakes. This in no way excuses them or lessens the hurt they cause, but it means there is hope, epitomized in the extraordinary abolitionists, both black and white, who sought an end to slavery for decades before the Civil War brought its demise, as well as the civil rights activists who in more recent times sought to make equality real. Their stories are told vividly and well in the museum’s lower depths.
President Obama (at about 1:21 in the video) was in an introspective mood, as he seems often to be in these months before ending his mandate. Particularly effective was his effort to reframe the narrative associated with a single museum artifact, a simple stone with a brass plaque attached, to focus on the thousands of people who were bought and sold on this slave block rather than the forgotten politicians who once spoke from it (and are commemorated on the plaque). He, too, focused on recognizing mistakes and remaking America based on its ideals. He went so far as to praise the American athletes who raised clenched fists in protest at the 1968 Olympics.
No less than the Presidents and Chief Justice, others spoke, sang, and pranced in delight at the opening of a museum that celebrates both suffering and redemption: John Lewis, Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle, and the Howard University marching band were particularly notable. So too is the introductory film made by Ava Duvernay and her friends. Focused on a single date (August 28) in various years, it will surprise and delight even the most hardened heart.
Caveat emptor: my wife is the chief curator of the museum, responsible in particular for the visual arts gallery. It offers a haven of calm and incontrovertible beauty after the wrenching experience of walking up the ramps that take hushed visitors from the depths of slavery through emancipation, to the busy galleries devoted to extraordinary black achievement against all odds in sports, theater and film, music and other spheres.
Most of the visitors in the day or so since the inauguration have been black. They are enjoying a museum that stunningly tells their own, inherently heroic story. No harm in that. But a great deal more good will come when whites recognize that this story is also theirs. No one should miss it!
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