The 100-Year Mission To Create
The National Museum Of African American History And Culture
By Robert L. Wilkins

Salon.com: The long fight to build the National Museum of African American History and Culture

The long fight to build the National Museum of African American History and Culture

One year after winning a century-long battle to build the museum, we find it’s needed now more than ever

ROBERT L. WILKINS10.01.201711:00 AM

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has been open for a year now. The museum has received rave reviews, and it has quickly become one of the Smithsonian’s biggest attractions, with over 2.5 million visits in its first year. The museum’s mission — to “explore what it means to be an American and share how American values like resiliency, optimism, and spirituality are reflected in African American history and culture” — clearly resonates with the public.

Ironically, as the nation celebrates the museum’s anniversary, we are also debating the meaning of Confederate monuments.

Perhaps this dissonance was inevitable.

In 1915, D.W. Griffith released “The Birth of a Nation.” This epic (and racist) motion picture portrayed antebellum blacks as perfectly contented slaves, Confederate soldiers as heroes, and black Union soldiers as brutes intent on dominating whites and molesting white women. It lionized the Ku Klux Klan for lynching blacks and preventing black men from voting. Upon the movie’s release, The Confederate Veteran magazine gushed about its depiction of the Klan having “added an unwritten amendment to the Constitution of the United States . . . [that] the American nation shall forever have a White man’s government.”

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Posted in News & Events on October, 2017