National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Frederick Douglass, from the museum colleciton.
Washington, D.C.—Some of my friends thought I was crazy for going down to D.C. for the weekend just to see a museum.
That’s exactly what I did this past weekend, when I went to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
If I’d had my way, I would have been among the jubilant crowd that celebrated during the opening weekend of what many people on social media, including me, have affectionately deemed “The Blacksonian”.
And after watching a live stream of the moving dedication ceremony, I was more determined than ever to see it with my own eyes.
Prior to calling New Haven home, I lived in Alexandria, Va., which is just outside of Washington, D.C. For about three years, I spent my Saturday mornings as an ambassador for Black Girls RUN!, running around the National Mall with a group of black women who were breaking down barriers just by being who they were — black American women, running long distances, just for fun.
Our runs often took us past what was then the future site of the NMAAHC. And I wanted to see what had become of that very large hole in the ground we used to run around.
But the free, timed day passes have been harder to get than Beyoncé Formation tour tickets. Like many people, I jumped into the online queue to get two timed passes the first time they were offered, fingers crossed that I could get a weekend in October. I felt like I’d hit the lottery when I successfully made it out of the cue.
I woke up bright and early Saturday morning and arrived at the museum a good 45 minutes before my pass allowed me in; I used the time to just people watch. I watched the black men hawking tote-bags bearing the likenesses of President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, reminding everyone to get their bags because there are only a few months left in office.
I struck up a conversation with a black man selling bean pies. I watched as museum staff stood outside and gently told people that all the day passes were long gone and that people had started lining up to get them at 6 a.m. A man with a headset mic, who was not staff, was trying to help people with extra passes connect with people who needed them.
I helped a little girl and her mother take a picture in front of the museum’s sign near the corner of Constitution Avenue and 14th Street. I marveled at all the beautiful hairstyles women were wearing and how so many seemed to have dressed up for their first time on hallowed ground. I know I had chosen my own ensemble carefully, my Coreen Simpson Black Cameo affixed to my jacket.
I spoke. People looked me in the eyes, smiled and spoke back.
It all reminded me of the collective sense of goodwill I felt on the National Mall during President Obama’s first inauguration. And of how I felt this summer when I made my first trip to Martha’s Vineyard. We were all there for the same reason: to celebrate ourselves and the habits of a people who have always made a way out of no way.
That phrase would stick with me throughout my five hours in the museum. In fact, “Making A Way Out of No Way” was written above an exhibit that I can’t recall now, but remember thinking if black folks had a motto, that would be it. And the museum’s eight floors and more than 36,000 artifacts are a testament to that.
Nearly every inch of it is used to tell a story. On the way to the Sweet Home Café you will see an exhibit about the creation of the museum and the 101 years of history behind it. Inside the huge café not only does the food, culled from every region in the country, tell a story, but so do the walls. Even the gift shop has historical footnotes and factoids throughout.
I didn’t brave the 40-plus minutes in line it was announced it would take just to view the museum from the bottom up. Instead, I started out on the fourth floor, where there are interactive exhibits that cover everything from the tradition of stepping to what it was like to be a black traveler during segregation.
I was at the museum with one of my sorority sisters, and we both had a good chuckle about being bad at stepping. We also had more serious discussions about how there are two branches of her family, one in Alabama and another in Tennessee because of an ancestor who had managed to escape from slavery but surprisingly went deeper south. We talked about how my mother’s father, my grandfather, was made to flee the community he and my grandmother had lived in all their lives on the North Carolina/Virginia border because of the threat of lynching.
Everywhere I turned, I saw mostly black people, young and old, riveted by our history and all the things that we have contributed to our country and its culture, but also what we had created for ourselves in a place that seems to have always needed us but never wanted us. It also was a forceful reminder of all the ways that we, as a people, have striven and continue to strive to make America live up to her promises.
America loves to tell the history of her immigrants, and it is a great story of trial and triumph to be sure. But America tends to get a bit tongue-tied when speaking of the people who were enslaved here and their descendants. This museum helps untie that tongue by saying to the world that black people are not America’s problem, or its shame.
Because if you can come up from slavery, if you can come up from Jim Crow Segregation, if you can come up from all the markers in history where nothing less than your complete destruction was part of the plan, you have put a fine point on what people all over the world have been led to believe is possible in these United States.
The museum is an in your face reminder that if America is to ever be truly a great nation, black people must be — demand to be — part of its salvation. We are the rhythm in its redemption song. There will be no saving her without saving us.
The museum left me exhausted physically, but spiritually refreshed. I can’t wait to go back.
Too bad, that a black man's 25 year history on the U.S. Supreme Court is not even mentioned, not a footnote, not a scrap of paper. Nothing. Yes, Clarence Thomas.