Both familiar and hidden gems in North Carolina history have a new platform inside the Smithsonian’s soon-to-open National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The Washington museum houses large and small relics, photos and structures dating to the 15th-century trans-Atlantic slave trade. Dozens of items in the collection of more than 3,000 artifacts come from the Carolinas.
One of the most recognizable pieces comes from the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in that inspired a national wave of peaceful anti-segregation lunch counter protests.
Two restaurant stools from the downtown Greensboro Woolworth store are featured behind glass display boxes in the new museum’s “Era of Segregation” gallery. Part of the exhibit focuses on the lunch counter sit-ins from the ’60s, largely led by African-American college students.
Museum visitors can take a seat at a simulated “lunch counter” where an interactive display explains the preparation students took before joining anti-segregation sit-ins and the brutality they endured from police and onlookers. A piece of the actual Greensboro lunch counter is in the nearby Smithsonian Museum of American History.
"Era of Segregation" @NMAAHC features 1960 Woolworth Greensboro, NC sit-in & interactive "lunch counter" experience pic.twitter.com/Kdojjtk8RC
— Anna Douglas (@ADouglasNews) September 14, 2016
The lunch counter sit-ins are well-recognized scenes from the South during the civil rights movement. But museum officials also looked for ways to highlight lesser-known stories.
“We wanted to make sure we focused on the meaning of space for African-Americans and . . . (tell) the story of subdivisions and planned communities,” said Smithsonian curator Michelle Wilkinson. “One of my favorites is about Soul City, North Carolina.”
Soul City got its start in 1969 as a commercial and residential area near Henderson, North Carolina, about an hour north of Raleigh. Its founder, Floyd McKissick, a North Carolina native, was active with the Congress of Racial Equality. McKissick led CORE for two years after its involvement in the 1963 March on Washington and 1964 Freedom Summer.
The founder envisioned a place where African-Americans could take pride in their community, Wilkinson said. The Soul City story is found in the museum’s “Shifting Landscapes: Cities and Suburbs” exhibit. The display includes a 1976 “Soul City Sounder” newsletter announcing new home purchases in the community.
North Carolina history part of @NMAAHC collection. Soul City was planned community for all but esp African-Americans pic.twitter.com/VqVRBxiPan
— Anna Douglas (@ADouglasNews) September 14, 2016
“That idea that you don’t just survive but you thrive is definitely part of what the Soul City mission was about,” Wilkinson said.
Backed by federal Housing and Urban Development grant funding, Soul City never developed the way McKissick would have liked. A federal investigation into how the money was used cleared McKissick and his company of political allegations of wrongdoing, but left a cloud hanging over the development that scared away investors and residents.
McKissick’s son – N.C. Sen. Floyd McKissick Jr., a Durham Democrat – told McClatchy recently that “political sabotage” had ruined his father’s dream of a flourishing Soul City. The elder McKissick died in 1991.
“I think it was personal bias toward my father as well as racial animosity,” McKissick Jr. said.
Still, he said, he’s proud that his father’s legacy is represented in the first and only national museum dedicated to sharing African-American achievements, struggles and culture. A documentary and history book about Soul City are in the works.
Other North Carolina history at the museum includes items related to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded at Shaw University in Raleigh, and the “Wilmington 10” arrested activists.
EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE
Tar Heel State visitors can find another home state connection without even stepping inside.
The lead architectural company working on the building for the past nine years is a Durham-based firm: Freelon Group, led by N.C. State University-educated Phil Freelon.
I feel a high level of responsibility – to my family, to my ancestors, to my culture – to get it right.
Phil Freelon, museum architect
“As an African-American, I’ve been part of the history. . . . There are moments that are direct and palpable to me,” Freelon said in an interview with McClatchy this week before the museum’s media preview day.
Freelon’s work is distinctive on the National Mall, with external design elements paying homage to West African traditions as well as black artistic heritage in the American South and Caribbean. It’s not Freelon’s first museum, but it’s his most high-profile so far.
“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” he said. “I feel a high level of responsibility – to my family, to my ancestors, to my culture – to get it right.”
Museum officials this week praised Freelon’s work and called on visitors to consider how the history inside could change race relations in the United States.
“Ultimately, this museum looks back. . . . (But it) could maybe even help us find reconciliation and healing,” said Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s founding director. “This is a story for us all, not just one community.”
President Obama will speak at the opening ceremony of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. pic.twitter.com/hJxeGSjvla
— DC Maryland Virginia (@DMVFollowers) September 12, 2016
Anna Douglas: 202-383-6012, @ADouglasNews
Museum is portal to past and window to future
The first of the Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums to begin without a dedicated collection, its 3,000-plus artifacts were mostly donated from private individuals and organizations. But already, more than 100,000 people have registered as museum members, a Smithsonian record.
Designed to resemble an African wooden column, the museum’s exterior is covered with 3,600 bronze-colored aluminum panels that resemble 19th-century ironwork created by New Orleans slaves.
The $540 million, 400,000-square-foot facility comes more than 100 years after black Civil War Union Army veterans first called for a memorial to honor the contributions of black soldiers and other African-Americans in 1915.
President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation in 1929 authorizing a “National Memorial Commission” to construct a building to serve as a tribute to African-American contributions. But racial opposition in Congress blocked the appropriation of seed money. The stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression and World War II also kept the project from moving forward.
It wasn’t until December 16, 2003, when President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that the effort finally began to take shape.
Some view the museum as a small down payment on reparations and recognition owed to African-Americans after centuries of state-sanctioned bondage, inhumanity, violence and disenfranchisement in the United States.
The attitude is understandable, considering the horror of the Middle Passage, the false promise of Reconstruction, the shame of Jim Crow and the nation’s violent resistance to the civil rights movement.
But others see the museum as a long-overdue acknowledgment of America’s great failings on race and a salute to the resilience, faith and pride that helped African-Americans overcome it and thrive.
Just as pressure that bursts pipes can also produce diamonds, the museum explores the nation’s faulty racial plumbing and the priceless cultural gems that somehow came spewing out.
They include people like Muhammad Ali, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Ida B. Wells.
They also include jazz, blues and hip-hop – creative self-expressions of pain and pride that drew from African oral and rhythmic traditions. Yet they are all uniquely American art forms.
“The music, dance, distinctive foods, art and artists that people outside the United States associate with ‘American culture’ were and are originally African-American,” said an email from V.P. Franklin, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Riverside, and editor of The Journal of African American History. “White Americans are much more African-American than most will admit.”
Serving as a portal to the past and window to the future, the museum has the capacity to “touch lives and transform the way people see the world and interact with each other,” Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton said.
That theory will be put to the test almost immediately.
“Opening now at a time when social and political discourse remind us that racism is not, unfortunately, a thing of the past, this museum can, and I believe will, help advance the public conversation,” Skorton said.
Tony Pugh: 202-383-6013, @TonyPughDC
Tips for visiting
▪ Entry is free but advanced timed-entry tickets are needed due to demand. Same-day, in-person passes – also timed-entry – will be available starting Sept. 26 and distributed on a first-come, first-served basis daily.
▪ Parking on the National Mall is not available. Public transit options are nearby.
▪ Prepare for long lines to get in and crowded space inside.
Check the National Museum of African American History and Culture website for more.
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