“Jesus,” I heard the woman say in a voice of controlled disbelief behind me. “Jesus,” she said again.
We both stood before wrought-iron shackles that had perhaps been on the ankles of an enslaved African adult and child. She, I’m sure, was reacting to the smaller shackles, welded in hatred and worn in pain.
We were among a thick group of people moving slowly on the lower floor of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian in Washington. I had gone to DC earlier this week with friends to get my first personal look at the museum.
The room with the shackles also contained iron ballast bars and a weather-beaten pulley from the Portuguese slave ship the São José, which sank off the coast of South African in 1794 drowning more than half of the enslaved Africans aboard. The museum walls were wall-papered with the names of the slave ships that stowed millions of Africans. The text contained the ships’ country of origin – the Netherlands (the Dutch were the first), Portugal, the United Kingdom and France. Next was the date that the ships left the west African coast – from where most Africans were taken and where as many as 30 ships waited for them, according to one account.
The most shocking were the number of people who were squeezed into the belly of the ships and how many of them arrived alive. In many cases, more than half of the people did not make it. The fiercely independent Igbo people, the text on the wall noted, took their own lives by jumping overboard rather than be enslaved.
The story of slavery was a familiar one for me. The more impressive was the beginning of the history exhibit: It was a strong reminder that Africa was a continent of riches – in people, natural resources, centers of learning and culture, as Dr. Chancellor Williams had pointed out in his 1976 book “The Destruction of Black Civilization.”
That room detailed the history of Africa and its people – not as a monolithic group but a land of many who had their own languages, cultures and beliefs, and who traded with the Europeans as partners. As I took all of this in, I began to wonder what if Africa and its peoples had been left alone to follow the natural course of their history. As I visited the other lower floors, I encountered other instances where I wondered the same – instances where the hand of man changed the direction of African peoples both in America and on their native continent.
What if …
African peoples had not been rounded up – by both slave traders and their own homeland rivals – to become slaves? We know that man and civilization began on the African continent. We know that Timbuktu was a city of scholars, books, learning and culture. The museum’s exhibit showed a people who governed themselves, including Queen Nzinga of the Mbundu people, who protected them until she realized that she had to turn her rivals over to enslavers or lose her own people to those ships, according to the information on the wall (Another source noted that at one point, she offered sanctuary to Africans who escaped the enslavers and she fought off the Portuguese).
What accomplishments were lost when heirs to other thrones were taken as slaves to a country that treated them as inhuman and stifled their feelings of self-worth, their creativity, their industriousness. What would have happened had they remained in Africa to help develop it into a country that fought off the colonialism that kept its people dependent and poor.
What if …
The federal government had not pulled troops out of the South after the Civil War and African Americans were allowed to reach their full potential with assistance from a country to which they had given all? Reconstruction saw the rise of African American elected officials, including Robert Smalls, whose bronze statue stands proudly near a quote from Frederick Douglass on the second lower level of the museum.
A decade before, Smalls, then a crewman on a slave ship, had taken a Confederate ship out of Charleston Harbor and handed it over to the Union navy.
The South had lost the war and the federal government controlled the Confederate states. African Americans were protected, and with that protection they elected 2,000 black people to local and state governments, and Congress. Sixteen African American men, including Smalls, were elected to Congress from 1870 to 1877, when the government pulled out in a compromise that led to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president. African Americans were left on their own.
They were intimidated, killed systematically by the Ku Klux Klan – and by any other white man on the street – and denied all the rights that the Constitution had granted them. It would be nearly 90 years later during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that they fought back as a group for their own rights.
What if …
Mamie Till had not decided in 1955 to have an open-casket funeral to allow the world to see the disfigured face of her 14-year-old son who was savagely beaten because he whistled at a white woman? An only child, Emmett lived with his mother in Chicago and was visiting relatives in Mississippi at the time. In a video in a special section bearing Emmett’s refurbished coffin, his mother said that she didn’t want the funeral home director to clean up her son’s eye that had fallen from its socket or his head that looked like it had been beaten with a machete.
She wanted the world to see what the white men in Mississippi – who were acquitted – had done to her son for so innocent a gesture. That decision brought home the horrors of African American life in the South and galvanized people to protest who had never even considered it.
What if …
The National Museum of African American History and Culture was still a dream deferred? Talk of the museum began more than a century ago (1915) by black veterans of the Civil War, and a bill was introduced in Congress a year later to design a monument for “Negro soldiers and sailors.” In 1918 another bill expanded the monument to include African American history.
There was some discussion, even of building the monument on the mall but no money was put behind the bill. In 1929 Congress passed a bill to set up a commission to study the idea but still no money. In 1986 Congress began supporting the idea of a private campaign to build a monument, a Smithsonian commission backed it, and in 2003 Congress finally put its full force behind it.
Money was raised, a location was chosen, a design was approved, ground was broken, and finally the museum opened on Sept. 24. It is the only museum in the country that tells the story of black people from top to bottom (several museums tell pieces of it, including the civil rights history).
It’s a story you must go to DC to hear. Keep in mind that advance timed passes are sold out until March 2017, but you can try for same day timed passes at the museum itself.
