President Barack Obama, during his speech last Saturday to inaugurate the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture—a name Donald Trump mangled hours before his debate—observed that the museum would not be a panacea for the nation’s racial struggle. “A museum alone will not alleviate poverty in every inner city,” he said. “It won’t eliminate gun violence from all our neighborhoods, or immediately ensure that justice is always colorblind.”
Nor are these social and political issues at the core of the museum’s mission. Its purpose has been eloquently stated and published by the museum’s founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch III. “The African-American experience is the lens through which we understand what it is to be an American,” he said, and he paraphrased these words again at the opening ceremony.
Inside the museum’s imposing structure designed by Tanzanian architect David Adjaye are more than 40,000 items, and 3,500 of them were on display at the opening. The impressive array of artifacts range from Nat Turner’s Bible to Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong’s trumpet to one of Michael Jackson’s gloves. There is Harriet Tubman’s hymnal, the great diva Marian Anderson’s jacket and skirt, and a theater named after Oprah Winfrey, whose $21 million donation placed her among the top donors of the $540 million it took to build the museum.
The dignitaries at the opening ceremony were representative of the century-long odyssey to make the museum a reality. Rep. John Lewis was there as a living symbol to the collection of items in the museum that highlight the Civil Rights Movement. Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle were there to remind us of the contribution Black music has made to America’s cultural development, and each of them found memorable ways to commemorate that history.
Angelique Kidjo, a native of Benin, sang Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” and that invoked the museum’s Diaspora connection with Africa and the Caribbean that are essential in the global Black experience. It was a bit disturbing to see all of the milling about as Denyce Graves and the choir offered their rendition of the Black national anthem.
For all of its memorabilia, and Obama is right, the museum cannot resolve the critical issues that plague Black America. And none of the museums or repositories—the Schomburg, Moorland-Spingarn, etc.—can fulfill this need. What they can do is remind us of the heroic struggles, the many nameless freedom fighters who are part of that glorious history.
As Bunch noted, the museum is a lens, an aperture through which the nation and its citizens can began to understand what James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes have intimated through their essays, novels and poems.
There are those who have already expressed some disgust about the museum’s shortcomings: Its items are not reflective enough of Black militancy and resistance. It has sanitized some of our radical past. But this museum is just the beginning, just the first shot across the bow in reclaiming that journey immortalized by the Johnson brothers in their anthem.
“We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,” they composed in “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” “We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered. Out from the gloomy past, ‘til now we stand at last, where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.”
The museum is part of that “bright star” and part of the conversation the president said we need to have. “This museum can help us talk to each other, and more importantly listen to each other, and most importantly see each other,” he said.
As Stevie Wonder remarked, “I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m going to.”
And so, in the coming days and years, will millions of visitors.