On Saturday, the first national museum dedicated to the history of black Americans opened in Washington DC.
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CCTV America’s Sean Callebs reports.
He also invoked the protests happening nationwide over the deaths of black men at the hands of police, saying that the museum was “the place to understand how protests and love of country don’t merely coexist but inform each other”.
“While America should ponder the pain of slavery and segregation, it also had to find the joy, the hope, the resiliency, the spirituality that was endemic in this community”, Bunch said.
But as his presidential mandate comes to an end, polls show that most Americans believe United States race relations are faring badly.
“A clear-eyed view of history can make us uncomfortable”, Obama said. Among those who were able to visit on the museum’s opening day, many posed by the statue of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games Black Power salute and gazed at the juxtaposition of President Thomas Jefferson’s writing implements and the shackles he used on slaves.
Obama earlier inaugurated the striking 400,000-square-foot (37,000-square-meter) bronze-clad museum before thousands of spectators gathered in the USA capital to witness the historic opening. The patterned bronze colored tiles are inspired by 19th century ironwork created by slaves in the South, and allow sunlight into the museum through patterned openings.
“Exhilarating.” Visitors were enthralled by their trips through the new National Museum of African American History and Culture on its opening day, describing the experience as inspiring, cathartic and phenomenal, a word that came up again and again. The authorizing legislation was signed by President George W. Bush in 2003; the final cost was $540 million, half from the federal government, half from private donors.
Rep. Lewis told the crowd that the NMAAHC, “is more than a building, it is a dream come true”. Ground was broken in February 2012.
The history told by the museum, he said, “is a story that needs to to be told now more than ever”. “And by knowing this other story, we better understand ourselves and each other”, he added. It will be returned to the church for its 240th anniversary later this year.
First lady Michelle Obama hugs former President George W Bush, in an image that has since gone viral.
“A great nation does not hide its history, it faces its flaws and it corrects them”, Bush said. GE donated $5 million toward the museum’s construction.
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Jennifer Kirby, who traveled with her family from Atlanta, shared what she was most looking forward to seeing: “I think just being able to look at all the African American history in one set location, looking at Prince’s jacket, Chuck Berry’s Cadillac; I’m just excited about the whole thing”.
