Tiffany Jenkins

Making history | 22 September 2016

The Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which has taken a century to come into being, has a difficult mandate

‘A fool’s errand’. That is how Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, wryly characterises the decade’s work it took him to get the museum built. It opens in Washington DC this weekend. A talented fundraiser, he and his team matched the $270 million from the federal government (Oprah Winfrey donated $21 million, Michael Jordan $5 million), and travelled the country sourcing artefacts. Most difficult of all has been convincing critics that such an institution — devoted as it is to the history of black America — is necessary and not divisive, that it will tell a story, not of one culture for that culture, but of America.

No Smithsonian museum had ever started life without a collection until this one did. After much persuasion, gathered inside the new building — a shimmering bronze-clad structure, designed by Tanzanian-born British architect David Adjaye, situated on the National Mall in the shadow of the Washington monument — will be historic artefacts that include a segregation-era railway car, significant objects from the great and the good — Muhammad Ali’s headgear and a brass-and-gold trumpet owned and played by Louis Armstrong — as well as items from ordinary citizens; the museum instituted a programme called Save Our African American Treasures, which helped people to identify objects of importance tucked away in their cupboards and attics. As a result of these efforts, there will be five floors of exhibits, and 3,000 objects on display: emotionally charged slave shackles, Nat Turner’s Bible, the American slave who led the slave rebellion of 1831, and a training plane operated during the second world war by the Tuskegee Airmen (the first black American military pilots) rising up to a platform, aside which a quote from the poet Langston Hughes states: ‘I, too, am America.

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