Burning student issues PAGE 15
Court Chief Justice John Roberts jr told the history of the court’s moral failings and successes: Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld segregation, and Brown v Board of Education, which ruled it unconstitutional.
The museum was born after 100 years of fitful efforts, beginning in 1915 when a group of ageing African-American Civil War veterans came to Washington and proposed their own memorial, and through 2003, when a commission appointed by President George W Bush produced a report titled “The Time Has Come,” and officially established the newest Smithsonian institution.
“A great nation does not hide its history,” Bush said at the opening ceremony, where Smithsonian secretary David Skorton and museum founding director Lonnie Bunch also spoke. “It faces flaws and corrects them.”
There were a few moments of confusion and delay related to ticket entry on Saturday, but otherwise the two-hour morning ceremony and afternoon museum opening went on as planned.
Now the 37 000m2 building sits on the Mall’s last open space, next to the Washington Monument. Some of the artefacts inside had been preserved in other collections, but others had been stored in the family attics of regular citizens. They included Rosa Parks’s dress and Michael Jackson’s fedora, Harriet Tubman’s hymnal and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.
The leotard worn by then-16year-old gymnast Gabby Douglas in the 2012 Olympics, and the receipt of sale for a 16-year-old girl named Polly, whose Arkansas owner transferred her to another man, as property, for the sum of $600 in 1835.
In front of an exhibit featuring a case holding the shackles of a child slave, Tyree Boyd-Pates, a museum curator visiting from California and wearing a Jackie Robinson jersey, put his hand over his mouth, stood silently next to his girlfriend and shook his head in horror.
Near a map showing the paths of slave ships, Roy Myers, a retired advertising executive, ran his finger along the surface, tracing a path from South Africa to Georgia, where he grew up and where his family still lives.
Last year, Myers had a DNA test showing he had roots in Ghana. His wife, Stephanie, watched his finger resting on his home state.
“Fifty-four percent of us ended up there,” she said, noting the statistic listed on the map.
“I call it the birth canal,” Myers said of the route he had traced.
“This museum is incredible,” he continued, “because in many cases, as we know, the story has not been passed to the younger ones. It’s a difficult subject to talk about in any meaningful way. This museum is going to open up another side of it.”
Myers, like many of the visitors allowed into the museum on Saturday – 7 000 special guests and a limited number of regular passes – had come to witness a history that reflected the fabric of his own family. Visitors described unknowingly sitting at Southern drugstore lunch counters as small children and being told, angrily, to leave.
Or of attending segregated schools with hand-me-down books. Or, as one woman remembered, being taken away from her mother and her home town because the mixed-race union between her parents was dangerous.
The museum was designed to be toured from exhibits on the lower floor, which depicted the pain of America’s past, through to the higher floors, which honoured the contributions of African-Americans in culture, science and sports.
On a top floor, Bubba Knight, the musician and brother of Gladys Knight, quizzed visitors on their musical trivia and shared stories of performing at the Apollo. Funk legend George Clinton stood near his own band’s P-Funk Mothership, enjoying the crowds.
“You’re George Clinton? Get out of here!” said one onlooker when she spotted the sequin-wearing 75-year-old musician. “You always had outfits that were outrageous,” the fan said. She started dancing, and then Clinton started dancing with her.
“I feel like a child in a candy factory,” Clinton said. “It took so long, but I’m so glad it happened in my lifetime.
The Saturday opening came within 10 years in which the country elected its first black president, but in a year when the country’s racial wounds have repeatedly torn open, and in a week broken by more violence: In Oklahoma, a police officer was charged with the fatal shooting of an unarmed black driver whose car had stalled in the middle of the road.
In North Carolina, the governor declared a state of emergency after chaotic protests that followed another fatal police shooting of another black man.
It came more than 400 years after the first slave ship landed on America’s soil. It came 229 years after the Founding Fathers decided that black slaves should be counted as only three-fifths of a human being. It came 53 years after the Rev Martin Luther King jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, also on the Mall.
Back in the room of mourning, where Till’s casket sat on its pedestal, a woman walked away from the exhibit quickly, with tears pooling in her eyes. Another older man wiped his eyes with a tissue.
A young man behind him leaned forward as in prayer. – The Washington Post
It took so long, but I’m so glad it has happened