Day 3 African American Museum

The Smithsonian Museum of African American
History and Culture

The Museum of African American History and Culture is the first building on The National Mall that you come to after the Washington Monument, if you're coming from the west -- where the Lincoln Memorial is. 

We arrived there after walking and exploring everything on the Mall. Actually not everything at all. Not the Martin Luther King Monument. Not the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Son John and the grandsons were doing pretty well. I however was hungry, thirsty, and tired -- conditions that conspire to make me impatient at best. But I knew all the museums have cafes. So approaching the doors gave me hope that relief was at hand.

However, the guards at the door explained that you have to have tickets to get inside. They're free, but you have to get them before hand or at the door. Not the door where we were. It was for people who already had tickets. The door around on the other side of the building. Not a small building, nor a short walk. Hope dashed. 

I didn't know exactly where we were, but I knew there were more museums close by and all we had to do was go to the next one. But I needed to sit down and rest a bit. While John checked his phone for what was near us, two young African American women approached the guards at the door. They would be let in. As it turns out, they had extra tickets -- four extra tickets. Some of their friends had not been able to come with them. The boys and I -- count us. Four! The young women generously gave us their extras.

Saved!

The cafe there is wonderful. Sweet Home Cafe serves food representative of four regions in the U.S. the Agricultural South, the Creole States, The North States, and the Western Range. Considering I love all things Louisiana (one of the Creole States) I had a catfish po' boy and two big glasses of water. 

Fed, watered, and rested, I thought I was ready for the Museum.

The cafe is on the Concourse which is one level below street level, so we hadn't far to go to start exploring the museum. There are two more levels down. The lowest begins with 1400 and follows through to 1877, "Slavery and Freedom." The next level up explores the years 1876 - 1968, "Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation." The third level up is "A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond."

I didn't make it all the way through the lowest level. The subject matter is so intense and the rooms felt confining to me. I had to get out. A member of the staff helped me to the elevator and went with me to get out into Heritage Hall which is at street level. Apparently, I am not the only one who reacts strongly. The top-most level below ground, is the Contemplative Court -- a quiet place where people can reflect and decompress.




The boys made it through and I'm glad they did. They should know what happened. Plus, they got to meet Joan Trumpauer, a Freedom Rider, and hear her speak.


Click on the photo so the text is large enough to read. It was the young people then who made a difference.


Society so often depends on the courage of the young. On their courage and, what some may call, naïveté. They haven't yet been indoctrinated with what us oldsters believe is impossible.

Here was Ms. Trumpauer, June 7, 2018
a small, white-haired lady -- one of many
to whom I and America owe a debt of gratitude.

The museum is not all sad and distressing. It celebrates African American culture from music to literature to art. The upper floors are filled with beautiful things and good feelings. And, I'm glad to say, the place was awash in adolescent Americans of all colors and backgrounds.

Just one of the beautiful things, a tapestry by Romare Bearden

Reflection Pool

I grew up in the Jim Crow South where drinking fountains were marked "white" and "colored," where black children did not swim in public pools with white children, and white people did not eat in African American restaurants. Churches were segregated. Schools were segregated. Towns and cities were segregated.

To see people of every color together in a museum dedicated to African Americans is an inspiration and an affirmation that the future is bound to be better.

Leonard Nimoy and Star Trek -- An Essay

 image from xfinity.comcast.net

Leonard Nimoy

   March 26, 1931 -- February 27, 2015

This is a description of the world as I knew it when Star Trek and its cast came into my life. Leonard Nimoy’s death has given me an opportunity to think about how the world was then and how it’s changed.

I grew up White, Protestant, working class, in Oklahoma.

In 1966 I graduated from high school. Most of my close friends had graduated the year before and my college experiences started when they started college. With them I met Black people and gay people for the first time. “People” isn’t exactly the right word. I met one Black, lesbian woman. Her color was obvious. Her sexual orientation was not, but she neither hid it nor announced it.

And “for the first time” is wrong, too. I spent my first ten or eleven years in small Oklahoma towns where segregation was a part of life. The schools were being integrated one grade at a time beginning with the 12^th grade and working its way down. The towns still had “white” schools and “colored” schools. “Colored” was considered the polite term by my parents. My grandparents used the “n” word. I don’t remember anyone using the word Negro, except the news people on TV. Our towns had one main street – two maybe three blocks long. Some of the stores served White people and some served Black people. I was never in a “colored” store. I’m sure there were Black people on the streets Saturdays, but I don’t remember them. I think kids are just like that. All people belong to one of two groups. They are either grown-ups or kids. And you don’t pay much attention to grown-ups unless they’re kin or authorities. And kids are kids. Color, religion, and language don’t much play into it.

There were very few Catholics, no Jews, no Asians, and no Hispanics. A few people spoke with accents mostly German accents, but they were grown-ups.

Before integration got to the grade I was in, we moved into the Oklahoma City School District which was segregated by residential practices. For those of you who don’t remember that, it means Blacks were not allowed by custom to live in White neighborhoods. No laws had to be enacted to enforce this type of segregation. The general White public did it, some tacitly, some aggressively.

We had one Japanese boy in our class. No other Asians, no Hispanics, and few Native Americans. (We called them “Indians.” We didn’t realize there were any kind of Indians other than Native Americans.) I had never eaten with chop sticks. I’d never eaten avocadoes. And my grandmother’s idea of spaghetti was spaghetti stewed with tomatoes and sugar served over mashed potatoes. Oregano was not in our lexicon. I did meet a Jewish girl at Girl Scout Camp the summer after the sixth grade.  

We were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and we lived near Tinker Air Force Base. We all knew what number Tinker was on the Soviet hit list. We lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. Magazines had recipes for Jell-O salad and instructions for building a bomb shelter.

When the Oklahoma City School District was ordered to begin busing to integrate its schools, we moved to a college town north of Oklahoma City. A White, college town. Only the college was integrated and that not very much. Still no Black students in the public schools.

It was then that the ugliness of segregation struck me. Because it affected a fellow high school student. He was a year ahead of me. He was bright and funny and kind. And while in The City (that’s what we called Oklahoma City) he was refused service at a lunch counter because they thought he was Black. His ancestors were Italian and he was a life guard at the local swimming pool so he was dark-skinned. Somehow, the fact that they treated him like he was Black when he wasn’t was not the injustice for me. It was the fact that his dark skin could be used against him. That the color of anyone’s skin could be used against them. That was the injustice.

By the time I was in college, I realized that injustice covered a much broader field than just skin color. My friends who didn’t go to college because of finances or academic indifference or legal entanglements were being sent to war. My friends who were gay were being threatened. Black and White people were being killed because they wanted to help Black people vote.

Then Star Trek hit the airwaves. I could see on my little black and white TV screen all kinds of people working together to explore and save the universe. There was a competent Black woman, a half-Vulcan/half-Human man. There was a Japanese guy and a Russian. A Russian good guy. And the combination of people was presented to us as common-place, normal.

We’re part way there. There have been great strides in civil rights in this country. In most places we can be friends with, work with, live next-door to, and marry whomever we choose. The Internet makes it possible to communicate across most borders without needing permission. And in Space, we have the International Space Station and her diversity-rich crews. There’s more to do. There’s always more to do. But we truly are “going where no man has gone before.”

I know that Leonard Nimoy was not Mr. Spock, but he gave life and legend to the character who approached reality rationally and scientifically. His character was treated with love and respect by the other characters showing how it could be among humans (and part-humans.)

Nimoy’s family will miss him, the man they knew. They will know on a daily basis that Leonard Nimoy is gone. But us fans? We’ll soon forget that he is gone, because we’ll continue to see him as we knew him – Spock. We’ll see him whenever we want to. Or whenever we happen to. And he’ll continue to say to us “Live long and prosper.”

image from metalinjection.net

Mr. Spock

September 1967 -- Into the Future