Slavery: One tough story to tell

On the eve of the Civil War, Maryland slave Isaac Dorsey was granted his freedom. He stored the legal proof of his new status in a handcrafted metal tube and passed it down to his descendants.

His great-grandson, James Dorsey, recently donated these family treasures to the just-opened Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. But the $34-million institution, the largest African American museum on the East Coast, almost didn’t get the gift. A businessman and church leader, James Dorsey “once considered destroying the documents because of conflicted feelings about his family’s suffering in times of slavery,” an exhibition label says.

The Maryland museum is part of a wave of new African American museums, and Dorsey’s ambivalence about his past suggests one of the main challenges they face. Not only must these institutions wrestle with contentious and often emotional historical questions, but they must do so without scaring away donors or tourists.

“You cannot bring up the nobility of the African American experience in America without also bringing out the horror,” said the Rev. Joseph Darby, a member of the steering committee for the planned International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C. At the same time, he said, “you have to acknowledge that [the museum] also has to turn a profit.”

Discussions of slavery, however difficult, represent a necessary return to “ground zero” of American race relations, said Ira Berlin, professor of history at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard.

The museum boom, Berlin says, is part of a larger cultural conversation that has spawned books, films and television documentaries, including PBS’ recent “Slavery and the Making of America.” Monticello, Mount Vernon and other historic sites now make a point of exploring the contributions of African Americans to the plantation economy.

“The fact that there’s this extraordinary popular engagement with the question of slavery is a really striking phenomenon,” said Berlin, who is co-editing a catalog for a show debuting at the New York Historical Society in October, on slavery in New York. “It has a lot to do with a real crisis in American race relations in the beginning of the 21st century.”

Other experts say that the proliferation of African American museums -- including the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which opened last August in Cincinnati, and planned museums in Charleston; Washington, D.C.; Fredericksburg, Va.; Louisville, Ky.; San Francisco; and elsewhere -- reflects the liveliness of scholarship in African American history and a healthy impulse toward cultural preservation.

“I think it’s a wonderful renaissance,” said Sandy Bellamy, executive director of the Reginald F. Lewis museum, who compares this period to the establishment of historically black colleges and other institutions in the early 20th century.

“In some ways, it’s the right time,” said Lonnie G. Bunch, who next month becomes founding director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It’s a time that benefits from 30 years of real good scholarship on African American culture and history ... and a thriving black middle class and upper class that can help support” these museums.

Still, not everyone is eager to tell -- or to hear -- accounts of slavery, segregation or the civil rights movement. “We tell stories that people don’t want to be told,” said Lawrence J. Pijeaux Jr., executive director of the Birmingham Civil Rights Center and president of the Assn. of African American Museums. “There’s an effort in this country to forget that African Americans came here in bondage. If you’re telling a story on slavery, you have a lot more trouble finding funding than if you were talking about American art.”

In fact, many black museums -- including the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and the African American Museum in Philadelphia -- are struggling financially. After years of turmoil, the Wright museum, which has no endowment, opened a new core exhibition last fall, and museum President Christy Coleman says that annual paid visits have risen 80% since then. The smaller Philadelphia museum, founded in 1976 for the Bicentennial, has foundered for years. In March, the museum, with a deficit approaching $600,000, announced a six-month recovery plan, but its future remains uncertain.

Pijeaux argues that African American museums can capitalize on the rising importance of heritage tourism to attract more than just black support. “One of the things that helped us [in Birmingham] is that we’ve become a major destination point for tourists,” Pijeaux said. “Sometimes we get confused with racism and think it’s only black and white. There’s some green in there too.”

Visions of tourist dollars also have played a key role in Charleston’s evolving museum plans, especially after the city’s naval shipyard closed in 1996, said U.S. Rep. James E. Clyburn. “We now know the No. 1 industry in South Carolina is tourism,” said Clyburn, a civil rights pioneer who chairs the steering committee for the International African American Museum.

“This is not going to be a slavery museum,” said Clyburn, even though early press accounts, quoting longtime Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., represented slavery as its focus. (Riley was said to be traveling and could not be reached for comment.) Although Charleston was the leading U.S. port of entry for Africans during the slave trade, “I don’t know of any black person who wants to see a slavery museum,” Clyburn said. “That’s how this effort got sidetracked in the beginning.”

The smaller, renovated Old Slave Mart Museum, due to reopen in downtown Charleston next year, will concentrate on slavery. But the international museum, destined for the waterfront near the South Carolina Aquarium, “will show not just the middle passage and its impact,” Clyburn said, but also the connection between South Carolina and Caribbean culture, the role of the Underground Railroad, the effects of the civil rights movement and more.

Darby, pastor of Charleston’s Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church, said, “You can emphasize the positive and tell the same truth at the same time.” He cited the example of the Birmingham Civil Rights Center, which “deals with the civil rights era in a very stark and very frank way. But when you leave ... you end up feeling uplifted, rather than aggravated.”

But not everyone endorses this spin. One prominent dissenter is Edward Ball, author of the National Book Award-winning “Slaves in the Family” and the scion of one of South Carolina’s leading plantation dynasties. “What should happen is that there should be a major institution devoted to telling the story of the enslavement of Africans in the United States,” he said.

But Ball, who now lives in Connecticut, realizes that the sensitivities may make such a monument to slavery impossible, at least in his native state. “America’s self-account is of a heroic national narrative and of the progress of liberty,” he said. “People don’t want to engage the tragic background of America.”

While South Carolina flinches, however, Virginia is gestating a United States National Slavery Museum that, according to its newsletter, “will focus exclusively on telling the complete story of slavery.” The museum, in Fredericksburg, was founded by former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, a grandson of slaves and now mayor of Richmond. Designed by C.C. Pei, it is scheduled to open in 2007.

An even more ambitious undertaking is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture -- an institution legislated into being in 2003 after decades of hope, defeat and controversy. Bunch, its director, said that consultants were studying four possible sites, two on the National Mall and two nearby, and would make a recommendation in the fall.

“I want to try to create this museum with some urgency, so I’d like to do it in less than a decade,” said Bunch, adding that the project would cost at least $300 million.

Meanwhile, several regional museums are also coming on line. In Louisville, the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage will open next spring, while the Muhammad Ali Center debuts this November. In San Francisco, a December opening is planned for the Museum of the African Diaspora.

At the Reginald F. Lewis museum in Maryland, named for a businessman whose motto was “Keep going, no matter what,” the core exhibition, while not ignoring slavery and racial discrimination, tells a mostly upbeat story of African American resiliency and creativity.

“Our museum makes a conscious effort to not construct our identities out of slavery,” Bellamy said.