Photo of Donna Limerick, whose mother, Mae Reeves, who owned a hat shop in West Philadelphia for 50 years. Reeves' hat shop will be represented in the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture; Limerick, wearing one of her mother's creations, attended the ceremony Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2012. (Photo submitted by Dale Mezzacappa / Special to Philly.com)
WASHINGTON - President Obama led a parade of dignitaries at a festive groundbreaking for the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture Wednesday morning, with many expressing hopes that it can be a vehicle for understanding and healing on the still-fraught subject of race.
The museum, generations in the making, will “ponder the pain of slavery and segregation” but also “soar on the resiliency of a people,” said Lonnie Bunch III, its founding director. It will use “African American culture as a lens to more clearly understand what it means to be an American.”
In its halls, and through educational programs and traveling exhibits, it will celebrate ordinary lives, like that of Mae Reeves, who owned a hat shop in West Philadelphia for 50 years.
Reeves, now 99 and living in a retirement home in Darby, could not attend. But her daughter, Donna Limerick, was there – resplendent in a burnt-orange wide-brimmed fedora that her mother made during the 1970’s.
“This is a historic moment for me as an African American woman and I think for the world to witness the groundbreaking of a museum of this stature,” Limerick said. “It’s unbelievable.”
Mae Reeves’ hats and a representation of her shop will be part of an exhibit called “the power of place” and will serve as a window into life in West Philadelphia during the mid-20th century, said curator Michele Gates-Moresi.
As part of the museum’s focus on African American life, art, history and culture, “It will also look at how a very young black woman ran a successful business and was able to use her artistry and creativity and make a living at it,” said Gates-Moresi.
Gates-Moresi and another curator personally traveled to the shop – which had been preserved intact after Reeves retired in 2003 – to inspect its contents.
She told Limerick: “We would like all of this. This is history.”
The museum has already collected more than 25,000 artifacts. Philadephia historian and collector Charles Blockson donated 39 objects, including a shawl and hymnal, which belonged to Harriet Tubman. Blockson, who has a large Afro-American collection at Temple University, received them from her great niece and knew this was the place for it, said Gates-Moresi.
Obama and others said the goal of the museum, which is scheduled to be completed in 2015, was to weave the African American story into the larger American tapestry.
“When future generations hear the songs of pain and progress, struggle and sacrifice, I hope they will not think of them as somehow separate from the central American story,” said the nation’s first black president. “I want them to see it as…an important part of our shared story, a call to see ourselves in one another, a call to remember that each of us are made in God’s image.”
The museum, the 19th under the Smithsonian’s umbrella, will sit yards away from the monument to George Washington, the country’s first president and a man who also owned slaves.
The juxtaposition, noted former First Lady Laura Bush, “is symbolic of our national journey.”
Her husband, President George W. Bush, signed the Act of Congress that created the museum in 2003 after generations of false starts and political battles. Ultimately, it was a bipartisan effort. Laura Bush sits on the museum’s advisory council. Congress promised to pay half the $500 million cost, and is raising money as well from private donors.
Other locations were explored before the selection of this prominent spot on the mall, at 14th St. and Constitution Ave., near to the Museum of American History.
The mall itself, as Obama noted, is a site where “long ago lives were once traded, where hundreds of thousands marched for jobs and freedom. Here pillars of democracy were built often by black hands. It is on this spot are monuments to those who gave birth to our nation, and those who worked to perfect it.”
The Smithsonian’s officers did not shy away from noting that institution’s own history of discrimination.
Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian’s undersecretary for History, Art and Culture, noted that in 1862 the museum hosted abolitionist lectures attended by President Lincoln.
But the great black orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass was barred from attending. “I will not allow a black man to speak in the Smithsonian” declared the museum’s first secretary, Joseph Henry – even though his own trusted aide, Solomon Brown, was black.
Well into the 20th century, he said, “curators purposely excluded” artifacts regarding African American history.
“The historical record is checkered,” Kurin said.
Among the soaring rhetoric was that of Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten during the civil rights battles of the 1960s and said he spent “half is career” sponsoring legislation to establish this museum.
Lewis said that “the story in this building has the power to set a whole nation free.”
Obama, who came with First Lady Michelle Obama, said that the museum made him think of his own children and generations to come.
“When our children look at Harriett Tubman’s shawl or Nat Turner’s bible, or a plane flown by a Tuskegee airman, I don’t want them to be seen as figures larger than life but to see how ordinary Americans can do extraordinary things,” Obama said. “How men and women just like them had the courage and determination to right a wrong, to make it right.”
He said he wanted his daughters and all children now and in the future “to see the shackles of bound slaves on their voyage across the ocean, the shards of glass from the 16th St. Baptist church ‘[in Birmingham, AL, where four young girls were killed], and understand that injustice and evil exist in the world.
But, he added, “I also want them to hear Louis Armstrong’s horn, to learn about the Negro Leagues and read the poems of Phyllis Wheatley. I want them to appreciate this museum not just as a record of tragedy, but as a celebration of life.”
Bunch brought onstage two students from the Stuyvesant Heights Montessori Academy in Brooklyn, N.Y., which raised $625 in coins for the museum. Piper Shillingford and Ajani Joseph Grant, both 4, shyly approached the President and First Lady and were rewarded with handshakes and hugs.
