New US Museum Highlights The African-American Experience

Washington: What does it mean to be black in America? Exploring that charged question is a core mandate of Washington's newest museum, a bronze-clad building tasked with both recording a painful history and celebrating a rich heritage.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is set to open Saturday as racial tension escalates nationwide, inviting visitors to reflect on black identity and vast cultural contributions while confronting the cruel history of slavery and segregation.

Barack Obama -- the first US black president -- is slated to inaugurate the long-awaited cultural institution.

From the outside, the striking building features three distinct horizontal sections, their facades jutting out at a slight angle and sheathed in bronze-painted filigree panels.

Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye led the museum's design team to construct a contemporary silhouette that stands in stark contrast to the sea of white marble and limestone that its neighboring museums create.

A museum conceived of more than 100 years ago, the final product is made of two parts: the lower level is dedicated to history and black empowerment, while the upper floors are dedicated to sports, music, entertainment, food and pop culture.

Located on the National Mall just a stone's throw from the White House and the Washington Monument, the museum includes slave cabins, a train car from the segregation era, a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong, and a red Cadillac driven by Chuck Berry.

Dark legacy of slavery

"How do you express something so unspeakable?" said Nancy Bercaw, curator of the museum's "Slavery and Freedom" exhibit.
"Instead of trying to say this is life and this is work, we tried to represent all those different aspects of a human life in tension," she told AFP.

Curators aim to accomplish this mission by juxtaposing objects, like a violin and chains, to show that life for enslaved people "was not just about work, not just about not being at work and not just about enslavement."

Slavery, which was abolished after a bitter 1861-1865 civil war, is the "foundation of where we are living today," said Bercaw, speaking in front of a slave cabin brought in from a former South Carolina plantation.

"If you are walking down the street, the fact that simply because the way you look, you can be stopped, arrested and sold. It's something that is 200 years old in America," she said, in reference to the current wave of African-American protests against police abuses.

"Some of these habits continue on within our culture because it was legally grounded in the very early beginning of the nation."

The weight of the past

At the segregation exhibit, portraits of Malcolm X and Rosa Parks hang alongside a white hood of the racist Ku Klux Klan and pictures of black lynchings.

The exhibit intends to "expose people to the breadth of the African-American history," said curator Spencer Crew. "It has highs, it has lows."

At the Civil Rights Movement exhibit museum-goers learn about key figures like Martin Luther King, as well as the rise of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther party.

A photo of a black soldier who served in the Vietnam War, for example, is juxtaposed with one of boxing great Muhammad Ali, who refused to serve and was prosecuted for draft evasion.

"It makes a counterpoint and suggests that there is no single way to be African-American in this country," said exhibit curator William Pretzer.

And amid national outrage over the spate of deaths of black men at the hands of police, the museum has gathered artifacts and ephemera to document today's Black Lives Matter movement, along with a digital kiosk to let visitors explore the violence still happening today.

The museum "fulfills an urgent need" to explain "the complex stories, achievements, and nearly impossible perseverance that black Americans continue to embody," said Thomas DeFrantz, African American Studies professor at Duke University.

He said he believes that a visit to the museum can help defuse racial tension by being "part of the discourse," he said.

"It won't help the white woman police officer who murdered an unarmed black man in Tulsa," DeFrantz said, referring to last week's shooting, "until she finds ways to understand the source of her abject fear and disavowal of black masculinity."

The balance "between oppression and fighting again oppression that has been a constituent part of our history," said Paul Gardullo, curator of the cultural exhibit, who emphasized the complexities of the African-American experience, one he called "central to the American story."

"It's not simple and it's not one unified identity. It is different according to the region you live in, different across time, it's culturally different and diverse."