Visitors to the museum can start on the basement level, shrouded in darkness as if we were in a slave ship’s hold. The sound system plays the lurchings of a heavily loaded wooden ship at sail, a sound the enslaved would have heard ceaselessly for months. We see preserved artifacts from slave ships, manacles that the slaves were bound by. One contemporary account describes how a slave ship’s deck was covered in blood and mucus, resembling something more like a battlefield. Pictures show how the people were packed in, stacked up, mired in their own filth. Absorbing it all was powerful in a way that no film I am aware of has gotten across — the despair, the stench, the sexual violation even during the passage, how many subjected to it jumped overboard, surely to drown or be devoured by sharks, rather than endure what was ahead.
As visitors move forward through history, we walk up gently sloped ramps into succeeding eras, then up further still, until we get to this century and we are up on the ground floor, standing in the daylight. This arrangement draws visitors into a participatory journey, a physicalized kind of argument, that our story is one of progress, rising, arising, emergence and blinking in the unfamiliar light. The journey is thrilling and it’s devastating, but most of all it is inspiring. We need more of that.
Ralph Ellison asked in 1944 if a people can “develop over 300 years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?” It is true that Black people have been central in compelling America to stand up for its humanist ideals, as The 1619 Project teaches. But we cannot base our sense of self on an act of rebuke against someone else. Our importance is much greater.
A smart, educated Black woman once said to me, casually, “I think we’ll always be a sad people.” But why would any humans settle for sadness? We should acknowledge the tragedy, yes, but what we did well should be celebrated at least as loudly.
Exhibit A: the grand old Black business districts in American cities in the first half of the 20th century. We learn about the ones that were brutally burned down: Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, and Tulsa, Okla., in 1921. These are utterly gruesome stories that must be told, and the museum does so. But the vast majority of Black business districts, such as Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue, the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C., San Francisco’s Western Addition and the Black Belt in Los Angeles, did not suffer this fate. They were, in their time, victories.
