How did the National Museum of African American History and Culture come into being?

In July 2005, I drove from Chicago to Washington and started this great adventure. This trip gave me enough time to think about whether my decision was correct or not. After all, I love Chicago, my home in Oak Park, and my job as president of the Chicago Historical Society. But it's too late to turn back now. I agreed to be the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This is an opportunity and my obligation to the community, which goes far beyond my reservation.

According to this story, the National Museum of African American History and Culture was built.

Purchase related content exclusive photography provided a musical lineup for the opening of the African American History Museum from within the African American History Museum. I announced it on my first day at work. That's great. I was told that we would set up a temporary office somewhere outside the national shopping center. When I say "we", I mean me and the only other person in the staff, Tasha Coleman. Tasha and I searched our office and found that the door was locked, so we went to the front desk of the building and asked for a key. They said, we don't know who you are. Not only did we give you a key.

Then I went to the security office of the building and told them that I was the new museum director and I wanted to enter my office. The police officer said no, because we have no record of you.

I went back to the castle, the Smithsonian headquarters building, to make sure that we should be allowed in. While I was standing there looking at a locked door, a maintenance man was pushing a cart with some tools in his hand. One of the tools is a crowbar. So we borrowed it and broke into our office.

At that moment, I realized that no one was really prepared for this effort, not the Smithsonian Museum, not the American public, and maybe not even me.

On September 24th, the museum currently has nearly 200 staff members, who will officially send the public to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Institution's 19 Museum. We will open a $540 million building in the National Shopping Center, covering an area of 400,000 square feet, showing some of the more than 35,000 cultural relics we have collected from all over the world. At the end of President barack obama's term, it is a good opportunity to open this museum when racial issues need to be clarified and understood. First of all, I want to tell you how we did it. The founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture took a group photo in front of the museum that opened to the public on September 24th. (Alison Shelley)

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This moment was born out of a century of intermittent and failed efforts to commemorate African-American history in the American capital. 19 15, a group of African American civil war veterans proposed to build a museum and memorial hall in Washington. 1929, US President John Calvin Coolidge signed the authorization legislation to commemorate "the contribution of blacks to American achievements", but the Great Depression ended this situation. The ideas of "democrats" and "democrats" put forward in the 1960s and 1970s received little support among members of Congress. In 1980s, with the help of Mickey Leland, a representative of Texas, people rekindled their desire to build a museum. A bill put forward by Georgia Rep. John Lewis in the late 1980s prompted the Smithsonian Institution to formally study what the "presence" of African-Americans in national shopping centers might be. The research concludes that the museum should exist as an independent museum, but the budget problem limits this plan. In 2003,

A delegation appointed by President Bush studied this issue again and published a report, the title of which reflected its conclusion: "The time has come." That year, Congress passed a law authorizing museums.

For the museum curator, all we have to do is define a vision, hire an employee, find a website, collect a collection where there are no collections, design and build a building, and ensure that more than 500 million US dollars are raised from private and public sources. By showing how all museums will benefit from the establishment of NMAAHC, learn to cooperate with the most powerful and influential board of directors in any cultural institution and answer all reasonable arguments, otherwise this museum is unnecessary.

I know that this new museum must be used as the pleat of the National Museum of American History in the shopping center. I worked there for 12.5 years, first as the curator and then as the deputy director of curator affairs. A colleague and I collected the lunch counter of Green Sboro -ins, and Green Sboro -ins is one of the iconic cultural relics of the museum. ) But I have been a historian all my career. I know the story of America is too big for a building.

A pocket bank, probably 1926, depicts a national black memorial hall that has never been built. (Wendell A. White) The Smithsonian Museum has done something that other museums can't do: it has opened different entrances for the public to enter the United States, whether through the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the National Air and Space Museum or the National Museum of American Indians. The door we are opening will give us a more complicated and comprehensive understanding of this country.

The decisive experience of African-American life is that we must go out of the dead end, and agility, intelligence and perseverance will establish a place in this society. For centuries, such efforts have profoundly shaped the history of this country. In many ways, African-American history is the essence of American history. Most of the expansion of American freedom is related to the experience of African Americans. If you are interested in the American concept of freedom, if you are interested in expanding fairness, opportunity and civil rights, then whoever you are, this is your story.

Museums pay attention to a specific ethnic group, and usually only pay attention to the views of insiders on that ethnic group. But the story we are going to tell is far more than that. It includes not only African-American history and culture, but also how this history shaped American identity. In the past 1 1 year, my goal was to build a museum, which imitated my expected country: a diversified country; This is fair; It has been striving to improve itself better and realize the ideals in our founding document.

The vision of the museum is based on four pillars: First, use the power of memory to help the United States illuminate all the dark corners of the past. The other is to prove that this is not just a national journey, but a national story. The third goal is to become a lighthouse, illuminating all the work of other museums in a cooperative way, not petite. The last question is that the world first understood the number of Americans through African-American culture in order to reflect on the global dimension of African-American experience.

One of the biggest challenges we face is how to deal with the widely different assumptions about what museums should be. Some people think that it is impossible to discuss frankly some painful aspects of history, such as slavery and discrimination, in museums supported by the Federation. Others strongly believe that the new museum has the responsibility to shape the mentality of future generations, and should do so at a time when African-Americans may be simply described as real victims, and create a museum that emphasizes the first and positive image of reputation. On the contrary, some people think that this institution should be a Holocaust museum that describes "what they did to us".

I think the museum should be a virtual museum. We think it is very important for planning exhibitions, publishing books and making online, and showing the quality and creativity of our work to potential donors, collectors, members of Congress and the Smithsonian Museum.

There is no collection, only seven staff members, and we have no space of our own. We held our first exhibition in May 2007. In order to "let your motto be resistance: portraits of African Americans", we borrowed some rare works from the National Portrait Gallery. We invited a dear friend and talented scholar Deborah Willis as the guest curator. We exhibited this work in Portrait Gallery and new york International Photography Center. From there, it began a national tour.

This strategy has become a way for us and we can't get rid of it. Later, we got a special space in the American History Museum, and I began to hire a curator who reflected the diversity of America. Sometimes I get criticized, but if I think we are telling a typical American story, then I need multiple perspectives. Now, the diversity of my staff is my pride, and it should be all those who care about the museum.

With the increase of staff, we organized 65,438+02 exhibitions, including art (murals by Hale woodruff, photos of Scarlock's studio), culture (marian anderson, Apollo Theatre) and history, which means facing up to difficult problems. We intend to hold some controversial exhibitions to test how to raise disputes and decide how the media or Congress will respond. "The Slavery of Jefferson Monticello: Paradox of Freedom", the cooperation with the historical site of Monticello, is a watershed. Of course, the issue of slavery is the core of the dilemma of the United States, and it is the contradiction of a country that is based on freedom but denies the right to be enslaved. Slavery is an unspeakable topic in contemporary American discourse, but we feel that we must face this topic in a way that shows how the United States was shaped by the so-called "special system" at that time. We showed an iconic statue of Jefferson, but we put it in front of a wall with 600 names among the enslaved residents of Monticello, not only to humanize them, but also to show that people could not understand Jefferson and other founding fathers without fighting slave production.

Another challenge is to raise funds to build and equip museums. In the end, we need to raise $540 million from public and private sources. I often think of how big this number is, usually when I have insomnia around 2 am. Maybe in the first week or two after I came here, we received the first large donation, a gift of 1 million dollars from the insurance company Aflac. I was so happy that I said loudly, "Yes, baby, we can do it!" " Later, I was reminded that in order to achieve our goal, the museum still needs hundreds of such checks. That's great. I realized that I might need to do more than a thousand demonstrations.

For these demonstrations, I saw more trains, more planes, more taxis and more hotel rooms than anyone else. But I learned two important things. The first is how far I can go in a day: Denver and the back. Further on, my body will collapse. The second time was in 2008, when the country faced the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, and we began to raise funds seriously. Things were terrible, but I was at a loss for the support the museum received at the worst time. The key to the success of museum fund-raising is the work of creative developers and the leadership of Dick Parsons, Linda Johnson Rice and Ken Chenot. Together with other members of the Museum Committee, they spend time and contact information to help the museum become a reality. The United States thanks them for their volunteer service.

Maybe it's my curator, but what worries me most is whether we can find historical things and cultural relics that can tell the story of this community. Some early Pullman Potter hats. This white hat is very special. You have to be a porter's leader to make sure you wear it, and I've never seen it outside the photo before. When this lady offered to donate this hat, I was very happy, because although we always knew that we were going to tell the story of Pullman Potter, this artwork would let us tell it in another way.

It comes from the popularity of the treasure project. A collector in Philadelphia called me and said that he had received a message from a relative of Harriet Tubman who died recently. Harriet Tubman was an abolitionist and subway conductor. As a historian in the19th century, I know that it is very unlikely that he has real Tubman information, but I think it is a short train ride from Washington to Philadelphia, so I can buy a piece of cheese grapefruit. We met in a room at Temple University. He reached into a box and took out photos of Harriet Tubman's funeral, which were very rare. When he took out a hymn, there were many Tubman reminding the enslaved people that she was in their area, and everyone cried. I cried, not only because these things were impressive, but also because collectors generously gave them to us.

Because we hire more curators, we rely more on their collection skills than what people bring us. We have a general idea of the stories we want to tell, but we have no idea of the cultural relics that determine how we tell these stories. We knew that we were going to talk about the role of women in the struggle for racial equality, but we didn't know that we could collect the banner of 19 10 from the colored women's club in Oklahoma, which said "lifting weights while climbing mountains".

Others donated robes belonging to the Klan, one of which was used by Stetson Kennedy. He sneaked into the Klan and wrote the book "I Ride with the Klan" at 1954. These and other potentially inflammatory cultural relics raise a question, that is, how can we display them without being considered as exploitation, voyeurism or pornography. Our answer is: the environment determines everything. As long as we can use it to humanize the individuals involved and explain the depth of the struggle for equal rights, any works of art are unrestricted.

Curators operate under a firm instruction: 70% to 80% of their collections must be placed on the floor of the museum, not in the warehouse. We don't have the money to collect, say, a thousand baseballs, but only two. Sometimes I have to be persuaded. A curator brought a teapot-a beautiful teapot, but for me, it is just a teapot, and it needs some money to buy it. Then the curator pointed out that the teapot was engraved with the mark of Peter bengtsson, who was born in St. Croix and came to Philadelphia at the end of 18. Although his name is of great significance to people who study decorative arts, this is only the fourth example of his existing works. So I suddenly found that it is not a teapot, but a concrete manifestation of a person being enslaved by nature, gaining freedom, creating economic opportunities and showing a skill level. This skill is spectacular today, just like Nate Turner's Bible and Roy campanella's catching gloves. Surprise continues to affect our series. It turns out that in 1939, the skirt that marian anderson wore when he held a historic concert at Lincoln Memorial was Dennis Graves'. In 20 12, Ms. Graves was moved to donate this dress to us after singing at our groundbreaking ceremony. Chuck Berry gave us the guitar, and he wrote "Maybelline" as long as we also took his cherry red 1973 Cadillac Huang Jinguo. It was not until one of our staff visited him in Missouri and reached an agreement on an ice cream sandwich that the donation began to waver. George clinton bid farewell to his legendary P-Funk mothership, which made me understand how his stage art expressed his desire to transcend a society torn by racial conflicts. There is a feeling that the shopping mall is over-built, and this museum must go somewhere else; Another point, which has been fully expressed, is that this museum is too important to go anywhere else.

I spent several months evaluating this website with my deputy director, Kinshasa holman Conwill. For me, the question is, which is the most suitable for building a national museum to show a little-known and often underestimated history to millions of people who visit the Smithsonian Institution? Of the four cities on the list, two cities that are not shopping centers will have to spend extra money, including razing to the ground, resurfacing highways, and leaving an important history far from the mainstream of Washington tourism. One site of the shopping center already has a Smithsonian facility, art and industrial buildings, but it needs a major renovation. I believe it is much more difficult to raise funds to renovate an old building than to create something new and unique.

After reviewing these options, I think that the five acres of land on 14 Street and the northwest of Constitution Avenue are the best possible locations for this museum. There were meetings, reports, hearings and duel letters in the newspaper, and "controversial" did not begin to be described. But in June 5438 +2006 10, the Regent of the Smithsonian voted to build a museum in the shopping center, next to the Washington Monument, in the shadow of the White House.

"My first task tomorrow is to stop smiling," I said. I don't know what to say, but I must remember. This became a famous saying at that time.

I know that I hope that the building is environmentally friendly, so as to enhance the landscape of Washington and reflect spirituality, promotion and flexibility. Of course, it must be the function of the museum, but I don't know what it should look like, just not like another marble Washington building. Earlier, I received a series of information from an architect asking for the design of a museum, so I know that this task will arouse global interest. But questions abound: Do architects have to be colored? Should we only consider architects who have built museums or such expensive and complicated buildings? Is the task only open to American architects? "

I think the architectural team must show their understanding of African American culture and suggest how to inform the architectural design of this culture. I also think that this building should be designed by the best team, regardless of race, country of origin or the number of buildings it has built.

More than 20 teams gradually disappeared; We screened out six finalists. Then I set up an expert glove from inside and outside the Smithsonian and asked the petite team to submit the model. Later, I did something that my colleagues thought was crazy: we showed these models at Smithsonian Castle and asked the members of the museum to show them to the public. People realize that the choice of gloves may be different from the preferences of tourists. I'm willing to take the risk for transparency. I want to make sure that no one will criticize the final choice because the process is flawed.

I chose the architecture team, which was the most stressful weeks in my job. After all, we should work hard together, dream together and oppose it for ten years together. We have a unique opportunity to build some rich African-American history. We have a risk of more than 500 million dollars. But those weeks were also my most inspiring weeks. Some of the best architects in the world, such as Sir norman foster, Moses Safi, Dill Scofidio and Riviero, described how their models express their understanding of what we want.

What I like best is designed by a team led by Max Bond, Dean of the African-American Institute of Architects, and Phil Freelong, one of the most productive architects in America. Max's model has also been well received by the public. After a very rigorous and frank evaluation, the design became the unanimous choice of the Committee. Unfortunately, shortly after Max's death, we made a choice, which promoted david adjaye, who was born in Tanzania but practiced in Britain, to become the chief designer of the team.

The iconic element of the design is its crown, which appeared around the bronze crown for the first time. It has a basic function of controlling sunlight into buildings, but its visual symbols are equally important. Corona originated from the building in Yoruban. For David, it reflects the purpose and beauty of Cariati in Africa, also known as the veranda pillar. To me, it has several meanings. The corona tilts upward and outward at an angle of 17 degrees, which is the same as the Washington Monument, so the two monuments talk to each other. We have a picture of black women praying in the 1940s. Their hands are raised from this angle, so the corona reflects the spiritual side.

The most striking feature of corona is its filament design. I don't want to simply pierce the corona to limit the reflective performance of the material, but I want to do something that respects the creativity of African Americans. So I suggest that we use wrought iron patterns of many buildings in Charleston and New Orleans, which were made by enslaved craftsmen. This will be a tribute to their unrecognized labor and that of many others who built this country. For a long time, many African-American experiences have been hidden in people's sight. Not anymore.

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Once you enter our museum, you will be surrounded by history. The exhibition will explore the era of slavery and freedom, the era of apartheid and recent American stories. On another level, you will explore the concept of community in exhibitions, which examine the role of African-Americans in military and sports, and you will learn how local forces can ensure that there will never be an African-American experience. The last exhibition explores the role of culture in shaping America, from visual arts to music to movies, drama and television.

Historical things will be your guide, whether it's a real slave cabin rebuilt near Friedman's cabin, a train carriage with isolation seats, or a skirt that carlotta Voss' parents bought for her on 1957. She and eight other children went to a comprehensive high school in Little Rock, or the rescue basket used after Hurricane Katrina. There are nearly 4,000 cultural relics that need to be excavated, utilized and memorized, and more are kept in museums until they can be rotated into museums.

The author's touchstone image: "Leaving the Field" by Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr (Hagarrett Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, University of Georgia Library) When I moved into my new office, I wanted to take away a photo that I had left on my desk for many years, and a photo of African-American women enslaved in the late 1970s 19. I was attracted by this photo because her short figure reminded me of my grandmother. She is walking on a small slope. She has a hoe taller than her in one hand. She holds a basket in her other arm to harvest corn or potatoes. Her hair was neatly wrapped, but her clothes were in rags. Her joints are swollen, which may be caused by years of working in the fields. She is obviously tired, but her posture is arrogant. Although she has everything, she is still moving forward.

This photo became my touchstone. Whenever I am tired of politics, whenever money never seems to be needed, and whenever I am overwhelmed by a difficult deadline, I will look up to her. I realized that because she didn't give up, I had an opportunity that she couldn't imagine. Like her, I moved on.