Facing our history

Today started off with a very special treat: A private group tour of the American Museum of African-American History and Culture.About 15 of us connected with ECCO (Entertainment Consortium Collaborative Outreach program) got up early and schlepped to the museum in windy, chilly weather. We had to be there by 8 a.m., two hours before the museum opens to the public. Our tour guides for the day were Dwandalyn Reece, curator of music and performing arts at the museum, and Timothy Anne Burnside, a Curatorial Museum Specialist.We started down a couple of sub-levels, in the 1400s, examining the early days of the slave trade. At this time, slavery was not hereditary, was not based on race, and was not a permanent condition - even for the person enslaved. It wasn't until 1750, that American law even created the concept of "whiteness" and "blackness" and defined slaves as black and made it not only lifelong, but hereditary.The South was wholly dependent on the continuation of slavery for its economy. After the international slave trade was outlawed by America in 1807, the only way to get more slaves was to make sure they had children. This has forever shaped our nation and really has never gone away.Our Founding Fathers, despite lip service to equality, preferred to keep the white-run colonies together as one nation rather than give any rights to those enslaved. Slaves were not allowed to marry (though they did, secretly) and their babies were taken from them, often sold to other, far-away families to keep the slaves' families broken.Post-Reconstruction, we saw all the structures that kept black people from having rights in the early United States rebuilt as Jim Crow and other laws. We cared more about making up with our white Southern brothers and sisters than about protecting those who had been terrorized by them.This photo is of names etched in glass on wall after wall after wall at the museum - all are black victims of lynchings:Think about today, when anyone defends the Confederate flag as representing their "culture."Your culture was slavery, bro.Fast-forward to the Civil Rights movement, and perhaps the crown jewel of the museum: Emmett Till's original casket (his body was exhumed in the early 2000s for DNA testing) and a video interview with his mother several years ago.No cameras allowed in this small room, as you're forced to face what was done to a 14-year-old boy accused of improper advances toward a white woman. By the way - that white woman a few years ago admitted her court testimony on that matter was false. Men took Tills and beat the life out of him, then used barbed wire to tie his body to a piece of concrete and drown his body.His mother chose to have an open-casket funeral and did not let the funeral directors touch up his corpse. His eye hung out of its socket and his head was bashed in. She was only able to identify him by an earlobe. She wanted the world to see what was done to her child.By not allowing photography in the room, the museum forces visitors to face the reality without a lens between them. It also prevents stupid people from taking selfies with the casket (if you think that wouldn't happen, don't google "concentration camp selfies").On the average day, the line to go in the small room where Till's casket sits wraps around the larger room outside. People go to bear witness.Till's brutal murder (though the murderers were acquitted, of course), galvanized many who had never stood up and marched before.We see this happen again and again, though, don't we?I was reminded of the day before, when I took this photo at the Newseum:Amazingly, a much smaller percentage of white people believed that African-Americans could have been rioting over their actual treatment. (No, I'm not amazed.)I was discussing our refusal to understand our history with several people today. If we ignore the past and believe that everything now is new and moves forward from here, we ignore the reasons why things are the way they are now and don't give ourselves a chance to actually begin to fix any of it.A video about the Little Rock school integration quoted a man saying that black Americans had their own schools to go to, why should we allow them in ours? And those schools, he opined, were probably better than the schools white children went to anyway. (Protip: They weren't.)That's led our nation to, far too often, ignore what we can do to actually fix things. Those bad things happened in the past, many will say. Why should we have to pay for the sins of our fathers?If no one ever does, that bill still comes due some day. Not paying it doesn't make it go away.I'm not necessarily even talking about monetary recompense. I'm talking about even simply acknowledging that what this country did for so long was wrong, and that we compounded that wrong with Jim Crow and with Separate but Equal, and continue today to refuse to believe that there is any systematic racism.All photos by me.