The Best Museum in the Country?

The second Trump administration has been attempting to bring under tighter ideological control key cultural and intellectual institutions, including major universities, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. One prominent target is the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), in the administration’s crosshairs for “improper ideology.” Director Kevin Young resigned a year ago under pressure from the administration. A distinguished poet, writer, and scholar, Young was a worthy successor to the NMAAHC’s founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, now the director of the Smithsonian itself (and embattled by the Trump administration for the same political reasons.)
 
I have enjoyed the privilege of visiting NMAAHC four times. It does not portray anything ideologically suspect, though it may present a history with which some Americans are unfamiliar. Indeed, it may be the best museum in America. And one suspects that is why the Trump administration wants to throttle it.

​Every element of the visitor’s experience has been meticulously planned and designed. Visitors begin below the entrance level, after a preparatory elevator ride that descends deep underground. This elevator feels like a freight elevator, and because the museum is enormously popular, visitors are often herded into it. This is a design feature, an unsettling experience of being crammed and confined. The doors open onto the ground floor which confirms the initial unsettling. Here one confronts immediately, and in stark prose and image, the history of slavery.
 
Moving, often heart-wrenching exhibits show how slavery was formed as a distinct part of Western colonial capitalist enterprise. The United States itself emerged from this environment, which indelibly colored the foundations of the nation. This is, one suspects, the part of the story the Trump administration most wants to occlude, but it is also arguably the most essential part. Because it means that both slavery and liberty, bondage and freedom, have been essential to the story of America. We don’t understand our history, and we don’t understand ourselves, the museum rightly insists, unless we wrestle with this paradox. In brilliantly conceived exhibits, the NMAAHC shows a parallel history of American westward development, as many Americans sought new freedoms and new opportunities, alongside determined efforts to secure slavery within this period of exultant expansion. Freedom and bondage co-exist, the museum shows us, as engines of American history, the eternal paradox that defined the nation and one which continues to mark our national experience.

​The second floor then moves visitors through the history of Jim Crow segregation, introducing the full range of cultural, political, and economic strategies whereby white America (especially, though not exclusively, in the South) consolidated political advantage in the face of the Constitution’s putative new post-Civil War protections for black civil rights. One is struck by the pervasiveness of Jim Crow tactics and, I must say, by their creativity. The Constitution guaranteed Freedmen the full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote. How Southern communities, in particular, denied those rights is a complex story of strategy, misdirection, violence, cultural prejudice, rank judicial usurpation, and naked political power. The Northern stratagems, a bit more subtle but no less creative, would come a little later.
 
The third floor expands into the brighter world of the civil rights movement. We learn not only about formal civil rights leaders such as MLK or Rosa Parks, but about the myriad individuals and community groups who challenged Jim Crow via their own determination. We encounter leaders in business, the arts, sports, and political life who achieved success despite Jim Crow’s creativity and the unending obstacles thrown in their path. The third floor also offers multiple exhibits on black contributions to American political, business, scientific, and military life.

The top floor opens into a wide panorama of black creative joy as we celebrate the myriad contributions of African American culture to American life. The arts figure prominently here and exhibit after exhibit of black musicians, comedians, actors, writers, and artists reminds that without black culture, there is no distinctive American culture.

​There are additional hands-on learning experiences for kids. And there is a large meditation room, quiet save for the expansive water feature that invites reflection on what we’ve just seen and learned.
 
Trump’s executive order attacked the NMAAHC directly, accusing the institution of casting the greatness of American history “in a negative light.” This is an oft-repeated trope, that investigating and bringing to light shameful, dark, or violent aspects of American history is unpatriotic and an attack on America itself. This is, as it always has been, a small-minded, parochial, and misguided criticism. It is, indeed, one of Jim Crow’s favorite tactics. There have always been Americans eager to victimize other Americans, and it is in no measure unpatriotic to point out this plain fact.
 
There is no reason why visitors to the NMAAHC can’t see themselves in a narrative that starts with oppression, but which then shows individuals striving against that oppression to create something exuberant, even magical. There is no reason why any visitor can’t identify with the plight of the enslaved, the struggle of those determined to overcome discrimination and subjugation, the thoughtful and determined organizing of heroic resistance to systematic oppression, and the expression of exultant joy and vitality. That story is not complete yet, but anyone who views the NMAAHC’s story as wholly negative misunderstands that story and indicts their own limited and limiting imaginations.

There are not many better conceived, more historically grounded, and more essential museums in contemporary America than the NMAAHC. Far from being muzzled, NMAAHC should be celebrated as a model of the thoughtfulness and engagement to which all our institutions should aspire. I encourage your visit. It is most certainly a destination attraction in a city of worthy destinations.
 
—David J. Snyder