New black museum prepared to deal with emotions, reactions of its visitors

ly almost like a kind of commemorative memorial space that you can go in and pay homage to those who were lost and those who survive.”

Museums have to be prepared to deal with a variety of emotions when dealing with charged subjects like slavery and civil rights, said Priscilla Hancock Cooper, vice president of institutional programs at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama.

After going through the Birmingham museum, visitors are offered a chance to talk with volunteers — many of whom lived through the turbulent civil rights era in Birmingham — to help process their thoughts and feelings, Cooper said.

“There’s an opportunity for that person-to-person contact, which may be needed,” she said.

The same will likely be said for the new Smithsonian, which will tell the story of slavery in a ground-level, personal way, officials said, instead of through numbers, dates and a bird’s-eye view of the past. “One of the goals of the museum is to humanize history, to give it to you on a first-person narrative, to give it to you on a human scale,” Bunch said.

Other emotionally draining exhibits include the casket of Emmitt Till, a black Chicago teen brutally killed for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi; an authentic slave cabin from Edisto Island, South Carolina; shards of glass from the explosion of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four young girls during the Civil Rights movement; a 90-year-old, 44-seat segregated Southern Railway car; and a 20-foot-plus guard tower and a cell from the Louisiana State Penitentiary prison called Angola after the slave plantation that once was on that spot.

“If we’ve done our job right, I trust the museum will be a place for all Americans to ponder, reflect, learn, rejoice, collaborate and ultimately draw sustenance and inspiration from the lessons of history,” Bunch said.