United Nation
Black history is US history
CHRISTMAS is a time when Washingtonians welcome visiting friends and family, and that’s when we do the tourist stuff. The museums are wonderful, but mostly we don’t notice them. Don’t get me wrong. We love them. We just save them for the time when we play tourist guide for the out-oftowners.
And that’s what took me to the Smithsonian’s new AfricanAmerican museum, when my daughter and her husband came to visit. It wouldn’t have been my first choice. I had read about how the museum made a big deal about Anita Hill and ignored Clarence Thomas, and thought that gave me a permission slip to ignore it. But then tourist guides don’t get to choose, so off we went.
I’m happy I did. Whoever put it together is a genius.
From the outside, the building looks small, its size limited by the Mall’s available real estate. From the inside, however, it’s huge, with not an inch wasted. The exhibits are tightly packed, and yet there’s an illusion of space. The visitor is pulled from one iconic display and one fascinating artifact to another, without ever feeling overwhelmed.
The contrast with the American History Museum, across 14th Street, is striking. With twice the footprint, it has only a fraction of the exhibits, and they’re separated by a lot of empty space. Now we’ll show you this amazing thing, it says, and then over there we’ll show you another. But after all, how often do you want to see Archie Bunker’s chair, or the dresses of the First Ladies?
With the African-American museum, by contrast, there’s so much happening that after a two-hour visit you come away thinking you’ve only seen part of it, that you need to return if you want to get it all.
There’s another big difference between the two museums. The African-American museum features a heavy emphasis on the Civil Rights revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, as you’d expect — but it’s not about Lyndon Johnson or the white federal judges who enforced the law at personal risk to themselves. Rather, it’s about Martin Luther King, Bayard Ruskin and Stokely Carmichael.
You see Dwight Eisenhower sending federal troops to Little Rock, and some white faces amongst the civil-rights protestors, but mostly it’s an entirely African-American affair. Mercifully, I didn’t see anything of Jesse Jackson.
And all that seemed right to me. Even the Nation of Islam and the 1995 Million Man March. Where everything else preaches inclusiveness, what else should the African-American museum be but African-American?
And yet the museum in one respect is a failure, though a magnificent one. For even if the museum had been designed with solely African-Americans in mind, the visitor from other races and cultures will come away with the feeling that you can’t understand American culture and history without appreciating how integral the AfricanAmerican contribution is.
The museum first draws you to the top floor, dedicated mostly to pop music. From Louis Armstrong to hip-hop, it’s impossible to separate out black music from American music. Can you imagine American rock shorn of African-American in- fluences? Actually, you can. It’s called Canadian rock. More lyrical maybe, but less rhythmic, less urgent, less American. And less popular.
The floor below is largely devoted to sports, and it’s the same thing all over again, from Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali to Tiger Woods and the latest Olympic athletes. It can blow you away, which may explain why the biggest crowds gather round to see a video of the Harlem Globetrotters.
Leaving the singers, the sports celebrities, the novelists and poets, the visitor descends on a huge elevator to the underground levels where the story begins the third floor down with the arrival of African slaves. From there one ascends to the Revolutionary War, where blacks fought on both sides, some seeking their freedom by joining loyalist forces, and from there to the slave revolts, the underground railway, the Civil War and finally the Civil Rights movement.
It’s not about you if you’re not black, and yet it is about you if you’re an American. It’s about a history, an experience that is unequivocally American, that is American to its core.
That’s why all Americans should see it. Maybe next time if they visit us for the Inauguration.