A new museum on the National Mall does justice to black history

[Nye Bevan]

THE skyline of Washington, DC, has never seen the like of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will be opened in September by Barack Obama. The museum marches upwards in three sharp-angled tiers that, its architects say, pay homage to wood carvings found across west Africa at the time of the Atlantic slave trade. Its outer skin of dark, bronze-coloured, cast-aluminium panels is at once handsome and a shock on a National Mall dominated by monuments in cool, white marble.

.....

The museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, works hard to convey the everyday viciousness of slavery for its victims. This is not easy: few slave possessions survive today. But staff have scoured archives to find black voices, testifying to the resilience of slaves, their religious beliefs, friendships, family ties and aspirations—even if that aspiration, as one curator notes, may have been just to be able to read. One long wall of the history gallery has been turned into a giant timeline, marked with the dates of legal landmarks and major events.

The slave cabin of weathered timber, crated up and transported from Edisto Island, South Carolina, stands at the wall’s midpoint, near the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. From the cabin’s front door can be seen dates going back to colonial times—fittingly, for settlers brought the first Africans to tiny Edisto Island in the 17th century. From the cabin’s back door can be seen the dates of the nearly century-long era of segregation, stretching away from the end of the civil war to the time of civil-rights struggles in the 1960s. Objects on display, some of them gathered from public roadshows around the country, will include a shawl belonging to Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and organiser of dozens of slave escapes. The terrors of nameless victims will be captured too, through such objects as an amulet in the shape of miniature shackles from what is now Guinea-Bissau, intended to protect the wearer from being enslaved.

Ramps lead upwards to galleries recording the black American experience of everything from the armed forces to sports, business, education and music (Chuck Berry has donated a red beast of a Cadillac that carried him onstage at a 1986 concert). As visitors climb they move forward in time. They will also move farther away from the easy political consensus that surrounds the deepest galleries, with their tales of enslavement and violently enforced segregation. Visitors of all sorts can shudder, as one, at slave shackles small enough to fit a young child’s wrists, and wince at the glass-topped coffin that once held Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 (allegedly for whistling at a white woman) was one of the sparks that inflamed the civil-rights movement.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21699149-new-museum-national-mall-does-justice-black-history-building-redemption

The slavery exhibits sound powerful, compelling, and disturbing, much like visiting the Holocaust museum. This is clearly a must-visit and is long overdue.

[awoke_in_2003]

1. K&R

I hope to make a DC trip in the future.

[Recursion]

2. Moving back in 6 weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this (nt)

[Raine1967]

3. We've been watching the constrction going on over the past few years.

I am very much looking forward to going there when it opens. The exterior of the building is stunning!

Here is more information about its opening.

http://nmaahc.si.edu/About

Opening September 24, 2016, the museum is under construction on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on a five-acre tract adjacent to the Washington Monument. Until then, we invite you to visit our gallery located on the second floor of the National Museum of American History.