Museum reveals hurts of US blacks

Born after 100 years of fitful efforts that started in 1915

IN A dim, quiet back room in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington a greyhaired man paused in front of a bronze casket and stood to pay his last respects to Emmett Till.

“Jesus,” whispered the man, a retired college administrator named Samuel Wright. He leaned forward. He saw that behind the glass, inside the coffin, lay a picture of the disfigured face of Till, a 14-year-old boy who was lynched in 1955 for the alleged offence of flirting with a white woman.

“That was something terrible,” Wright said. Behind him, the next person moved forward quietly to see the terrible artefact of history, and another person after that.

The scene in Washington on the African-American Museum’s opening weekend: The National Museum of African-American History and Culture opens its doors to the public. The visitors had all come to this building on the Mall – presidents and statesmen, Freedom Riders and Tuskegee Airmen, a 99-yearold woman whose father was born a slave and died a doctor – to see a museum chronicling one of the most profound narratives in America’s identity; a place exploring both the country’s history and its present, its greatest shame and its people’s greatest triumphs.

“African-American history is not somehow separate from the American story,” said President Barack Obama in a ceremony before the museum’s opening.

“It is not the underside of the American story. It is central to the American story,” he said, adding that it was a narrative that was messy and full of contradictions, “as all great stories are”.

He addressed an audience of tens of thousands, who watched in folding chairs and on large screens, some of whom had travelled thousands of kilometres to see Oprah Winfrey and Will Smith read poetry by Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes, and to hear the joyful and anguished performances by Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle and Denyce Graves.

Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, D-Georgia, talked about growing up in Alabama and cutting out pictures of African-American heroes. Supreme