Went to the African-American history and culture museum yesterday - everyone should. Despite what I imagine some people believe, it’s not just violence and trauma porn, it’s a lot of day to day normal stuff on the upper floors. My wife wondered where the slavery and Jim Crow stuff was, but it occurred to me that it would probably be concentrated somewhere else in the building - excessive focus on slavery and trauma is a complaint I’ve heard about cultural stuff usual made for white audiences.
Who wants their entire identity defined by violence? The upper floors mention it (Tulsa 1921, Chicago 1919, Fort Pillow massacre, Angola prison in Louisiana, etc) but there’s a lot more stuff about everyday life, including Robert Churchwell - that guy was the first Black reporter to work in a major white paper in the South, which much have required self control few people have. The Olympics guys have their own statue, and so do the Williams sisters.
We came in a bit late, so we didn’t get a chance to see everything, but we got into a good bit of the dark stuff in the basement. I didn’t know but wasn’t surprised to find out that Denmark was involved in the slave trade - they used to own St Croix and a couple other Caribbean islands they sold to the US at some point, which seems to be when they got out of the slave trade, at least in the US.
Probably the most informative exhibit (“favorite” sounds wrong) was the segregated train car. You really get a sense of how petty and cheap the racists were - the Black bathrooms are tiny (about the size of airplane ones now), white ones have a “lounge” area, which is weird, but regardless of how weird it was they had more space. Plus you couldn’t use the suitcase storage areas unless you were white, which is just ridiculous.
If I get a chance to go back I’ll have to see if they’ve got a Wilmington 1898 exhibit and what they have about COINTELPRO-related fuckery. Probably the single most horrifying thing in there is the child-sized shackles, but there’s also plenty of stuff in there that isn’t evil or soaked in blood.
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