38 NEWSWEEK.COM JULY 03, 2020
Lonnie Bunch when I posed that question to him about three
weeks after George Floyd’s death.
“You learn a lot about a country by what it remembers, but even
more by what it forgets,” Bunch added, once he’d stopped laughing
at me. “I was struck, years ago, by a letter I received where some-
body said that America’s greatest strength is its ability to forget.”
Few in recent history have done as much work as Bunch to
force America to remember. After years running the Chicago
History Museum, Bunch served as the founding director of the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History
and Culture—affectionately nicknamed “the Blacksonian”—be-
fore being named the first Black man to oversee all 19 Smithso-
nian museums. To walk the halls of the Blacksonian, from its
exhibits on slavery to its exploration of civil rights to its tributes
to Black sports and culture, is to be confronted by the extent to
which the nation has been crafted by its past. Neither the in-
equalities that plague us today, nor the fight to upend them, can
be separated from what has come before.
“There’s a lot of reason to recognize how today is tied to the arch
of history, how the struggle is ongoing,” Bunch said, nodding to the
protests surging in American streets, comparing the energy of this
moment to the civil rights push that followed the Brown v. Board of
Education decision and the murder of Emmett Till. “And the strug-
gle takes resilience. It’s not always one big moment where there
will be fundamental change. But what history tells you is that there
are moments where you see the country take a giant leap forward.”
Once a shared historical narrative can be established, a recon-
ciliation process can begin. “Restorative justice is a set of values,”
explained Fania Davis, executive director of Restorative Justice
for Oakland Youth. “It’s a theory of justice that brings together ev-
eryone affected by wrongdoing...We make mistakes. And we hurt
people by those mistakes. But we can make amends for those
mistakes, we can say sorry and we can take action.”
Davis is an elder in the movement, into which she was violently
thrust after two of her childhood friends were among those killed in
the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombings. “A big part of why you’re
talking to me today is that I left that experience with this deep yearn-
ing to be an agent of social transformation,” Davis told me.
She began working with the Civil Rights Movement, then the
Black Power Movement, then the an-
ti-apartheid movment, then the student
movement. Her former husband, a Black
Panther, was shot by police who had en-
tered their home as part of then-routine
surveillance of Black activists. When her
sister, Angela, was arrested and held on
murder charges (she’d later be acquited),
Davis traveled the world raising support
for her release. That fight inspired Davis
NOW AND THEN
(Top to bottom) A
memorial and mural
honoring Floyd in
Houston’s Third Ward,
where he grew up; activist
Angela Davis speaking
at a press conference
after her release from
prison in 1972 (her sister
Fania is to her right)..“THE BEST THING THAT CAN
TRUTH COMMISSION IS
OF PERMISSIBLE LIES THAT WE