51humiliations and worse of the Jim Crow
era to the escalating struggles for civil
rights, until the story climaxes in the
complicated present. In those galler-
ies visitors will find things like an omi-
nous pair of iron shackles, a bill of sale
for a 16-year-old girl named Polly—
price: $600—and, at the outer edges of
the grotesque, an 1859 advertisement
for a “Great Negro Mart” in Memphis,
promising a “general assortment of
Negroes at private sale and auction.”
They’ll see a cramped slave cabin and
an entire Southern Railway car, a 77-
ton relic from the era of segregated
travel and the legal fiction called “sepa-
rate but equal.”
Of the museum’s five aboveground
floors, one is devoted to African-
American involvement in social
pursuits and institutions like schools,
churches, business, sports and the
military. Another courses through high
points of black cultural achievement in
areas like music, literature, television
and the visual arts. The museum can
show only about 10% of its collection,
so over time some displays will change.
After all, African-American history—
and American history—will keep on
happening. The long effort to create this
museum may be a tale that’s completed,
but the story it was built to tell has
much more to come. •U.S. People were encouraged to bring
in African-American family heirlooms
to be evaluated by museum experts and
maybe to be donated. Through that
kind of outreach the museum acquired
nearly four-fifths of the roughly 34,000
items in its collection, including one of
the most precious, a Bible once owned
by the slave-revolt leader Nat Turner.An institutionthat traces the
narrative of African-American life
for what may be as many as 4 million
visitors a year has to satisfy no end of
tricky agendas. It has to sift
the past to rescue people
from anonymity, as it does in
a room that lists the names
of almost all the 612 slaves
Thomas Jefferson owned in
his life. It has to represent
not only the brutality and
sheer perversity of slavery
but also the resourcefulness
of those who suffered it.
It has to acknowledge the
election of an African-
American President but
also the plain fact, in
the era of Black Lives
Matter, that America
remains a work
in progress.
But if it has totell stories of pain and sacrifice, those
cannot be the only ones. It can’t forget
about Chuck Berry’s hilarious red
Cadillac or Muhammad Ali’s headgear
or the outfit Marian Anderson wore to
sing in triumph from the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial after being barred
from performing elsewhere because
she was black. It can very well contain
a concrete guard tower from the
notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary
at Angola, but also something much
more literally uplifting, a plane used to
train some of World War II’s Tuskegee
Airmen, the first black
American military pilots.
It has to both pass through
hell and point to the wild
blue yonder.
Bunch knows this. “One
of my goals was to help the
public embrace the ambiguity
of the past,” he says. “That’s
where the greatest learning is.
We want you to come to this
museum, and we expect you
to work a little bit.”
Almost two-thirds of the
museum’s 400,000 sq. ft. is
below ground, where gal-
leries lay out the compli-
cated journey from slav-
ery and the fight against
it, through the daily1973 Chuck Berry’s Cadillac Eldorado1946 Louis
Armstrong’s trumpet1989 Boom box used in
Do the Right Thing1965 James Baldwin’s passport1973
Muhammad
Ali’s sparring
headgear▽
In designing the
museum, British
architect Adjaye
turned to his own
African rootsIMAGES COURTESY OF THE COLLECTION OF THE SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE (9); ADJAYE: AP