The national museum of african american history and culture

The collection’s dependence on viscerally affecting items reflects the Smithsonian’s tendency toward a broad, largely artifact-based history—Here’s somebody’s Buick! Here’s something Walt Whitman once touched!—meant to induce gooseflesh, or thoughtful moans. Its curators know how impatient tourists and students can be. Eleven of the Smithsonian’s twenty enormously popular museums are situated on the Mall, and the lawn is perpetually bright with camera flashes and school-group T-shirts. “People are gonna give you two hours per museum,” Bunch told me with a shrug.

But artifacts cannot speak for themselves; the meaning of a museum is determined by acts of interpretation. It’s natural to see the museum’s opening as part of a continuum that began in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, with the advent of black-studies programs, or even earlier, with the work of Carter G. Woodson, an author and scholar who was the son of slaves—in other words, as part of the history of black history. Bunch, however, rejects this idea. “What I argue is: This is not a black museum. This is a museum that uses one culture to understand what it means to be an American. That, to my mind, is the cutting edge.”

He spoke in terms like this throughout our conversation, with an unrelenting deliberateness, as if from a page of talking points. “This is a story that is too big to be in the hands of one community,” he said at one point, describing the story that is America. And then, speaking of the sojourn of black people in this country: “This is, in some ways, the quintessential American story.” And, later, contrasting the efforts of his staff with other, more possessive ethnic histories: “Instead of simply saying, ‘This is our story, period,’ we want to say, ‘This is everybody’s story.’ ”

Bunch’s framing of black experience, as a lens through which one may better see some static American text, sidesteps more than a century of scuffles over the nature, and the meaning, of that experience. Between the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington and the activism of W. E. B. Du Bois, the romance of Zora Neale Hurston and the social realism of Richard Wright, the defiance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the caution of “respectability politics,” there has always been something along these lines: go along or fight back, persuade or condemn, love or leave, use a common language or create one of your own.

Bunch may be a fighter, but he seems eager to avoid such a clash—the cost, perhaps, of doing business with Congress, on whom so much concerning the museum depends. (More than half of the funds for the building have come from the federal government; the balance has been provided by a star-studded group of private donors, including Michael Jordan, the television producer Shonda Rhimes, and Oprah Winfrey, whose contribution of more than twenty million dollars is commemorated by the museum’s Oprah Winfrey Theatre.) Bunch told me about a meeting he had with Jim Moran, a former U.S. congressman from Virginia, who initially opposed the museum: “He says, ‘O.K., Lonnie, I don’t wanna be rude, but I don’t think there should be a black museum just for black people.’ And I said, ‘Neither do I.’ Blew him out of the water.”

With benefactors like these, there may have been little incentive to engage more directly with the most heated debates about black identity and culture, or to empower the scholars best known for leading, and reflecting upon, those exchanges. Seven years ago, one such scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested by a white police officer while trying to gain entrance to his own home, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This led to the now infamous “Beer Summit” with Gates, President Obama, and the arresting officer. Gates later offered the museum the handcuffs used to detain him. Bunch initially declined the gift, before reversing himself.

“Butterflies on your own time, Brady! We’ve got a porn empire to run.”

“We listened to all the best scholars, even if we didn’t always end up doing what they thought we should,” Bunch told me. Eric Foner has offered his expertise to Bunch and his team throughout the planning process. “They’ve made a very big effort to engage scholars, at all points of planning,” Foner said. “This museum cannot satisfy everybody—I don’t suppose any museum can—and I think the more Lonnie can point to input by current scholars, well-known scholars, this will help to deflect whatever criticism might be coming their way.”

Perhaps Bunch hopes that the mere location of the museum will, in its way, speak more freely. The symbolic axis of the Mall has always been a source of silent but tangible power, particularly with respect to the history of black Americans, beginning with the slave pens that once dotted the land and culminating, perhaps, in the subtle stage design of the March on Washington. “The Mall is America’s front yard,” Bunch said, when I asked him about the importance of the real estate, “but it is also, in some ways, the place where more people come to understand what it means to be an American than anyplace else in the country.” His familiarity with the Mall, and its conventions, led to one of the museum’s most striking features. “I wanted a darker building,” he said. “I didn’t want the white marble building that traditionally was the Mall. What I wanted to say was, there’s always been a dark presence in America that people undervalue, neglect, overlook. I wanted this building to say that.” Then, as if to balance out this quick foray into confrontational talk, he added, “I also wanted a building that spoke of resiliency and uplift.”

The museum stands on the last available plot on the Mall, just east of the Washington Monument, finished but not yet full. Designed by the Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, the building is a glass cube, sheathed in three broad, overlapping aluminum bands coated with bronze. Adjaye and his partner, Philip Freelon, call this outer cladding a “corona,” a reference to the beaded crowns characteristic of Yoruba art, from West Africa. The corona is decorated with a kind of lattice, a stylized version of the filigree ironwork made by slaves in New Orleans and South Carolina, giving the museum the look of a temple devoted to a vaguely benevolent god. The aluminum bands open as they ascend; trace their angles upward, and they might be arms raised in joy. Follow them downward, and you see the tips of arrows, pointing toward a burial ground, or to a thick knot of invisible roots. The Mall is one of the most tightly regulated spaces in the country, and Adjaye was barred from building any higher; an extra story would have obstructed the sweeping east-west sight line from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. More than half the building is underground.

For pedestrians on the Mall, the museum is hard to see from more than a few dozen yards away, especially during the spring and summer—the Mall’s famous row of American elms is particularly thick on the plot where the building stands. It is set back from the street, on the other side of a neat, rectangular lawn; up from the grass pokes the top of a glass-enclosed circular fountain, called the Oculus, which allows sunlight into the museum’s Contemplative Court, belowground, where visitors can pause to consider the treasures—and, if necessary, recover from the traumas—experienced so far. Over the building’s shoulder looms the Washington Monument, its red eye blinking down as if from the height of the nation’s founding.

Adjaye’s structure is the latest installment in the Mall’s meandering passage through trends in public art. The original design for the area, by Pierre L’Enfant, D.C.’s great planner-auteur, called for a shaggy informality. In his 1791 report to George Washington, L’Enfant imagined a lively promenade flanked not by museums and bureaucratic offices but by sites offering “diversion to the idle”—theatres, assembly halls, and public academies. This vision was never realized: financial strain and political gridlock stalled construction almost completely during the nineteenth century.

In 1902, the Senate Park Commission, in a report titled “The Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia,” reimagined the Mall. The architects and artists on the commission, stirred by America’s emergence as an imperial power, designed the space according to the neoclassical principles of the so-called American Renaissance. That visual style defines the Mall’s most iconic structures: the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Soon, however, a younger generation, influenced by the blossoming of modernism and by the shattered idealism brought on by two world wars, crashed awkwardly into the frame. Their work reached a nadir in the nineteen-seventies, with the brutalism of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the chunky Air and Space Museum. If the grand planners of the Mall were slightly grandiose, the late-century modernists zagged too far toward a tacky, post-human future.

Adjaye’s building might be the most successful modernist design on the Mall so far. This is partly because of its unashamed approach to symbolism. Touches like the corona’s outer lattice serve as a reminder of the human work that has gone into the making of America.

Three stories beneath the building’s airy upper views, on the museum’s bottom level, is an exhibit called “Slavery and Freedom.” Quotations from famous freedom-oriented national texts, presented chronologically—the Declaration of Independence, Absalom Jones’s Thanksgiving sermon of 1808, a stanza from the spiritual “Steal Away to Jesus”—are carved into a vast, unbroken, slate-gray wall. The objects in the exhibit include a tin wallet containing neatly folded freedom papers, a slave identification button stamped “PORTER,” and a Union Army recruitment poster from 1863, featuring Frederick Douglass’s rallying cry, “Men of Color, to Arms!” The chronological presentation and the tension between the relics and the promissory texts leave an impression of inevitability: the terrors of the slave trade giving way, gradually, to emancipation, hidden, from the beginning, somewhere deep within the national heart.

Slavery and freedom have, in America, always been intertwined, spinning toward and away from each other in a kind of ontological dance. But the museum’s hand-in-hand treatment of the concepts conveys an implicit promise to museumgoers of the uplift to come. This assurance is reiterated by the design of the “history galleries,” which, under one high ceiling, occupy the entire lower section of the museum. A series of wide, gently sloped ramps lift a visitor ever farther, in time and in elevation, from slavery—the title of Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up from Slavery,” made literal, and almost eschatological. Above, like a promise flown in from the future, hangs a yellow-and-blue training plane operated during the Second World War by the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black American military pilots.

Slavery might be better presented without the escape hatch of freer air above. After all, this is how it was experienced: not as a step on the path to somewhere else but as a cruel normalcy, a permanent condition, the life that one’s ancestors had lived, and that one’s children would surely live, too. The Holocaust Memorial Museum, across the Mall, offers a sober acknowledgment: for millions, this was a lifetime—an entire edifice, not simply a floor. “In Washington, D.C., there is no museum of American slavery,” Foner noted, when we spoke. He added, “We have a museum of the Holocaust in Washington, which is a great museum, but, you know, what would we think if the Germans put up a big museum of American slavery in Berlin and didn’t have anything about the Holocaust?”

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