The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 29 (2018)
Copyright © 2018 Akiko Ochiai. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
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A “New Integration” of Memoryin the National Museum of
African American History and Culture

Akiko Ochiai*

Introduction
On a bright, sunny day in late September 2016, the National Museum of
African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened next to the
Washington Monument, at the very axis of America’s National Mall (fig. 1).
It was the Mall’s eleventh Smithsonian-affiliated museum and the second“national” ethnic museum after the National Museum of the American
Indian (NMAI). Audaciously touting “A People’s Journey, A Nation’s
Story,” the NMAAHC invites people to explore American history andculture “through the African American lens.”1 In doing so, it encourages anational dialogue about race and reconsideration of “what it is to be an
American,” which ideally should heal historically inflicted racial scars andbring reconciliation to all Americans.2 At the finale of the grand opening
dedication ceremony, Barack Obama, the first “black” president, quoted “I,
too, am America” from African American poet laureate Langston Hughes,
stressing the indispensability of African American experiences to “tell aricher and fuller story of who [Americans] are.”3
Although the opening of the NMAAHC exceeded expectations, therealization of the NMAAHC had an arduous history, beginning with its*Professor, Doshisha University89

90    Akiko Ochiai

original inception in 1915.4 For over one hundred years, African Americans
endorsed a federally funded or national-scale African American museum
where they could present their often neglected and distorted history andculture. The enactment of the NMAAHC bill in 2003 was to realize this“dream deferred” or “lost dream,” yet their struggle continued to facechallenges. When Lonnie G. Bunch III accepted the founding directorship in
2005, he had “no collection, no money, no staff, no site.”5 He analogized his
position to “taking a cruise at the same time you’re building the ship,”6 andover the past thirteen years, he and his staff tirelessly ground “African
American lenses” to better discern American history and culture.
At the core of the museum development lies Bunch’s vision of a “newintegration.”7 Stressing the centrality of African American experience in the

Figure 1. The NMAAHC and the Washington Monument

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91

nation’s history, he asserts this integration will “help all Americans realize
how much they’ve been shaped, informed and made better by the African
American experience,” ultimately for the reconstruction of the nation’smemory.8 While the NMAAHC proclaims that its exhibits materialize thisintegration for all Americans, it actually bears a double burden of both
fulfilling expectations African Americans have historically entrusted to anational African American museum and pursuing new agendas the
NMAAHC has acquired as a Smithsonian-affiliated national museum. In
other words, the new integration squeezes the NMAAHC “between twin
desires to be inoffensive for all Americans and to provide a space for
African Americans where none existed before,” as Faun Rice points out inher museum review.9 Furthermore, the multiple approaches that the
NMAAHC adopts for the effective advancement of the new integration
require it to maintain multiple balances at the same time. How does the
NMAAHC confront such dilemmas, and how does it actually preserve themultiple balances in its exhibitions? What can we see through the foci ofAfrican American lenses?
I explore these questions by providing the historical context to Bunch’s“new integration” and elucidating the challenges that the newly established
NMAAHC faces in its memory making. First, I review the century-old
history of trying to establish a national African American museum to securea space for African American (re)presentation, highlighting four periods ofactivism. Second, after considering the philosophical foundations seen in the
NMAAHC’s vision statement and Bunch’s new integration, I briefly review
the opening exhibits. Third, I point out three approaches the NMAAHC has
incorporated: those of identity museum, emotional museum, andmemorabilia museum. The physical construction of the NMAAHC itself isundeniable, but its ongoing construction of memory remains contentious,
reflecting the dialectical characteristics that these three approaches embody.
The growth of memory studies and public history in the late twentiethcentury matched a concomitant rise in interdisciplinary studies on therelationships of African Americans to memory devices and sites such as
museums and memorials. Paul Shackel and others document the ways inwhich African Americans and their allies hotly contested the long whitedomination of public-memory construction.10 In Negro Building, Mabel
O. Wilson locates the African American museum movement in the context
of African American efforts to acquire their own “black counterpublicsphere” during the segregation era.11 Twenty-first-century studies advancethe discussion about how museums should interpret and (re)present the92    Akiko Ochiai

racialized past, such as the practice of slavery, because the past often entails
emotional pain or embarrassment and incites vigorous controversies among
the contemporary public.12 The more forcefully these studies remind us of
the power of previously constructed racialized memories and thesociopolitical forces behind them, the more we realize the weighty
expectation of the fledgling NMAAHC to reconstruct those memories.
Endorsement of a national African American museum in the nation’s
capital has always received media attention. Few academic articles,
however, have focused on the NMAAHC or its predecessors before its 2016
opening. While Fath Davis Ruffins compares unsuccessful African
American efforts to create a museum in the 1990s to the establishment of theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the NMAI, I analyze themajor obstacles to NMAAHC bills in the 1980s and 1990s as well as thefactors that contributed to the passage of the final bill in 2003.13 Just before
the museum’s opening, Robert Wilkins disclosed his painstaking research on
the earlier movements as well as his involvement in the politics critical topassing the NMAAHC bill.14 On the heels of the media deluge covering the
NMAAHC opening, academic scholars and museum professionals are now
publishing exhibition and curatorial reviews, but there remains a dearth ofhistoriographical studies.
A Century-Old Dream Comes True
African Americans long tried to secure a place, typically in the nation’s
capital, to inscribe their experiences, which American society had largely
ignored or distorted. As the racial environment surrounding African
Americans changed over time, their visions and strategies also developed.
This transition itself critically affected the process by which the NMAAHC
was eventually established and the facets the NMAAHC exhibits as anational ethnic museum.
The origin of the NMAAHC dates back to 1915, when Civil War veteransassembled in Washington, D.C., for the fiftieth commemoration of the war’s
ending. Unlike the original Grand Review of the Armies of 1865, thiscommemoration allowed African American Union veterans to participate.
While the valor of white soldiers in both the Blue and Gray was glorified,disguising sectional ideological conflicts and the race question,
discriminatory treatment against African American veterans was rampant
throughout the commemoration. To support these “second-class” veterans,
African Americans in the capital organized the Colored Citizens Committee

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for the Entertainment of the Veterans of the Encampment.15
With this committee at its core, the National Memorial Association(NMA) was organized in the following year to demand that the federal
government erect a memorial statue to honor African American soldiers. By
the early 1920s, the NMA changed its goal to having a memorial building.
With the NMA’s continuous efforts, in March 1929, Congress finally passeda joint resolution (Pub. Res. 70–107) that created the National Memorial
Commission for the purpose of erecting a memorial building “as a tribute to
the negro’s contribution to the achievements of America.”16 The Great
Depression, however, left the commission with neither funding
appropriations nor presidential and legislative support; under the New Dealreforms of 1933, it eventually withered. This first effort for a national
African American memorial building was critically linked to politicalprotests against relentless racism such as lynching. While mainstream
museums functioned as “temples” of whitewashed civilization, African
American leaders such as Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune
tried to secure a nationally sanctified space to remember African American
contributions and to earn the full respect of citizenship.17
Efforts to create a memorial building gradually faded into oblivion evenamong African Americans themselves. In the social changes of the midtwentieth century, African Americans turned to their African heritage,
shifting their emphasis from integration into the white mainstream toward
Pan-African nationalism. In this social atmosphere, numerous African
American communities gathered their meager resources to build
neighborhood museums and community centers that would not only spreadthe too-often-untold story of African Americans but also to instill racial
pride and serve their communities’ needs. These local museums also
symbolized independence: self-control and freedom of expression. The
DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, originallyfounded as the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art in 1961, and theCharles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit,
originally founded as the International Afro-American Museum in 1965, arejust a few of the more successful examples.18
On the federal level, not only the African American mass protest
movement but also the political instability reflected in race riots led todebates on the best ways to recognize African American history and culture.
Between 1965 and 1967, liberal white Congressional representatives
introduced several bills to establish a commission for a national African
American museum. These bills received divided support, however, from94    Akiko Ochiai

African Americans both inside and outside of Congress. In hearings ofMarch and April 1968 for bills (90-HR12962, 90-S2979) to establish a
Commission for the Study of Negro History and Culture, leaders of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
supported the establishing of a national museum. Many others, such as
Charles H. Wright, however, eschewed federal initiatives establishing whitecontrolled institutions and programs, preferring federal funding for local
African American neighborhood museums and/or African American studies
programs. After the hearings, African American representative Clarence
Brown (D-OH) tried to secure the establishment of a national African
American museum in his home district of Wilberforce, Ohio. In thefollowing two decades, his bills received sporadic consideration in Congress
but little interest from the Smithsonian Institute, eventually materializing in
1988 as the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, largely
funded by the state of Ohio.19
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a third wave calling for a national
African American museum. Shocked by the lack of African American
cultural presence in the nation’s capital, African American businessman
Thomas Mack persuaded Rep. Mickey Leland (D-TX) to introduce a bill
and resolution to pursue the possibility of a national African American
museum. Newly elected representative John Lewis (D-GA) joined the force,
introducing at every session a bill to establish a national African American
museum in Washington, D.C. Between 1989 and 1993, five congressional
hearings persuaded the Smithsonian to consider the proposed museum andresulted in sending bills to the floor in the 102nd and 103rd Congress (102S523, 103-HR877).20
The bills failed to pass Congress, however, as they encountered several
untoward obstacles. Most African American advocates in this era insisted onbuilding an independent museum right on the Mall, a larger version of theirneighborhood museums. Particularly, those like Mack and Rep. Gus Savage(D-IL), who opposed possible Smithsonian control, gave the American
public the impression of being engaged in self-serving identity politics. In
the midst of these so-called culture wars, people who wanted to slash
budgets and were cynical about political correctness grew reluctant tosupport governmental programs for minorities. White conservative senator
Jesse Helms (R-NC) took advantage of this mood to kill the bill in 1994.21
When the possibility of a national African American museum in thecapital seemed least likely, the young African American lawyer Robert
Wilkins, who sought a place to preserve oft-untold stories of his African

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American predecessors, discovered the NMA’s earlier effort in the twentiethcentury. Wilkins approached Lewis, who had repeatedly introduced themuseum bill without success. They were joined by African American
representative J. C. Watts (R-OK) and white Christian Right senator SamuelBrownback (R-KS), who had their own political and religious beliefs. With
political channels to Republican president George W. Bush and theRepublican-majority Congress, those two opened a door to a uniquebipartisan and biracial coalition capable of maneuvering the complicatedpolitics on Capitol Hill. Biracial advocates appealed that the NMAAHC
could become a place for “healing” and “racial reconciliation.”22 The result
was the formation of the NMAAHC Plan for Action Presidential
Commission in 2001 (Pub. L. 107–106) and, finally, the enactment of the
NMAAHC bill in 2003 (Pub. L. 108–184).23
Outside Congress, the tide had been turning to support the biracial effort
to pass the NMAAHC bill. Whirling through the culture wars, the concept ofthe museum as a forum took hold nationwide. Consequently, large
museums, once white dominated and authoritarian, had become moreparticipatory and multicultural arenas reflective of social relevancy.24
Furthermore, the general American public became readier to listen to the
racially conflicted national past epitomized by African American history. For
example, a public poll conducted at this time found that almost half of white
respondents regarded museums as a viable form of compensation forslavery.25 These changes as well as the growth of African Americanneighborhood museums, both in number and scale, caused African American
skeptics who feared a large Smithsonian-operated national museum todwindle in number.26
This lessened skepticism and fear of traditionally white-controlled
establishments did not weaken African American commitment to a proper
recognition of their story. Nor did it totally erase black nationalist tendencies
as expressed in the neighborhood museum movement.27 Embodying thosemultiple expectations, the presidential commission’s original mission
statement of the NMAAHC is both an extension of the history of the making
of a national African American museum and a new departure from it. Lonnie
G. Bunch and his staff received the baton from John Lewis and others tophysically establish the NMAAHC, based on the following statement: “TheNational Museum of African American History and Culture will give voice
to the centrality of the African American experience and will make itpossible for all people to understand the depth, complexity, and promise of
the American experience. The museum will serve as a national forum for

96    Akiko Ochiai

collaboration with educational and cultural institutions in the continuingquest for freedom, truth, and human dignity.”28
Bunch and the Crafting of African American Lenses
The 2016 opening of the NMAAHC epitomized what African American
scholars and curators such as Lonnie G. Bunch had achieved over the pasthalf century in mainstream museums, especially in the Smithsonian
Institute, which had been a stronghold of the white establishment. It required“experts with the vision, wisdom, and expertise to bring the museum tofruition.”29 In this section, I focus on Bunch’s museum philosophy, first bylooking into the philosophical framework of the NMAAHC, and then by
examining the actual exhibits developed from that framework.
Born in New Jersey in 1952, Bunch grew up in a predominantly whiteneighborhood, but he acquired a keen sense of history and race. He
remembers his childhood when de facto racism cast its shadow over even
Northern suburbs. After earning a PhD in history and teaching atuniversities, he assumed the position of founding curator of the California
African American Museum in Los Angeles in 1983. Subsequently, he held
other prominent positions including being president of the Chicago
Historical Society, until he became the director of the NMAAHC in 2005.30
Through his long career in history and museums, he acquired numerous
insights and cultivated his own philosophy and practical strategies, both ofwhich were essential for the foundation of the NMAAHC.
Based on the original mission statement created before his directorship,
Bunch developed a vision statement where he presented the “four pillars.”31
The first pillar declares that the NMAAHC offers everyone an opportunity tolearn African American history and culture. The second affirms that the
NMAAHC provides visitors with global perspectives. The third encourages
visitors to consider “what it means to be an American,” including the“resiliency, optimism, and spirituality” of the African American
experience.32 The fourth leads African American museums nationwide tocollaborate in promoting their shared mission.
Undergirding these pillars lies Bunch’s idea of a “meaningful and usable”
past.33 Bunch repeatedly affirms that history should function as a “tool,”“even a small weapon,” to “help change America, help force America toconfront the chasm between its stated ideals and the reality of life in
America for the people who are oppressed and marginalized.”34 In otherwords, history is a “barometer” to measure the change and accomplishment

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that America has made so far and the challenges it has yet to overcome, anda museum like the NMAAHC serves as a “beacon.”35 History also functions
as a useful tool to “understand the challenges within [our] own life,” tonavigate through the uncertainties of this global age.36 Thus, the NMAAHC
functions as a lens (often referred to in plural as “African American lenses”)
through which Americans re-view their stories both on collective andindividual levels.
To make the NMAAHC function fully as such a lens, Bunch advocates a“new integration.” Whereas integration in the civil rights movement era
largely was an effort for desegregation and equal treatment in mainstream
society, Bunch’s “new” integration requires a fundamental reconstruction ofnational memory.37 It is, perhaps, the NMAAHC building itself that mostsuccessfully symbolizes this concept. Designed by up-and-coming Ghanaian
British architect David Adjaye, its color (bronze but variable depending on
the weather) and shape (a three-tiered corona) as well as its exterior (porch
and filigree) all reflect rich cultures born out of the African diaspora,distinctive amid the white neoclassical structures of the National Mall. Its“dark” but “upward” modernist aspirational presence nonetheless imposes
itself as an integral part of America’s front yard.38
Its huge collection of nearly forty thousand artifacts, covering roughly
five hundred years of history of diverse people and areas, requires somecreative thinking and tremendous effort to bring to focus on the new
integration. In practice, Bunch weaves together artifacts and stories,emphasizing contextualization, humanization, and balance.
Contextualization means not only exhibiting racialized artifacts in thecomprehensive context of American history but also explaining them in alonger time span with a global perspective. Such contextualizationencourages the visitor to understand the new integration in a larger context.39
For example, in the Slavery and Freedom 1400–1877 section, The Paradoxof Liberty exhibit intertwines the American Revolution and the Haitian slave
revolt with African bondage at its core, including a Toussaint Louverture
statue and a Thomas Jefferson statue with a mountain of bricks behind him
inscribed with his slaves’ names.40 Contextualization sometimes creates a
new strain, however, because it not only emphasizes the centrality of
African American experience in nation building but also espouses
tendencies of black nationalist racial identity. This strain is exemplified in
my discussion of the identity museum below.
For Bunch, humanization has two aspects. First, it means recovering the
dignity of African Americans after centuries of denial and disregard of their

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humanity when they were treated as chattel or second-class citizens. By
presenting individual stories, the NMAAHC gives new visual reality tothose who have been misconstrued and obscured, to “those famous only totheir family” but “whose lives in quiet ways shape this nation.”41 Suchhumanization draws visitors’ empathy, which encourages them to engage
with the exhibits. In doing so, according to Bunch, visitors “can capture asense of the emotion and history,” a step toward connecting them to the“seemingly unconnected” past, and then “wrestle with its own individual,
regional or national identities.” By doing so, “the museum becomes atouchstone that explains, inspires and transforms” for social justice.42 Thissecond aspect of humanization serves as a basis of the emotional museum
discussed in the next section.
Because of his commitment to a new integration, Bunch faced challengesof telling “the unvarnished truth,” as his mentor John Hope Franklin
espoused.43 Even before the actual museum opening, he expressed his
determination not to “flinch from the most tragic episodes in African
American history,” in order to make the NMAAHC one of the national
forums that were “safe places for unsafe ideas.”44 At the same time, theexhibitions “aim to show how tragedy has been channeled into a drive forprogress and change.”45 After all, his NMAAHC is neither “the Museum ofDifficult Moments” nor “the Museum of Tragedy” but a museum of “abalanced history of America.”46 Thus, Bunch and his staff assiduously seek
“the right tension between moments of sadness and moments of resiliency”
in their exhibits.47 To balance sadness with resiliency, the NMAAHC takes
on characteristics of a memorabilia museum.
Given Bunch’s visions and emphases, how does the NMAAHC display its
actual exhibits? Based on my observations, along with media reports and the
NMAAHC homepage, I present an overview of the NMAAHC exhibits. In
105,000 square feet of exhibition space, the NMAAHC’s exhibitions are
divided into three main areas: (1) History Galleries: The Journey toward
Freedom; (2) Community Galleries: Making a Way Out of No Way; and (3)Culture Galleries: Tradition and Innovation. Once visitors enter the spacious
Heritage Hall on the ground level, they are escorted to the undergroundlevel, after which they walk through the floors above one by one.
The History Galleries occupy the three underground levels, starting with
the Slavery and Freedom 1400–1877 section at the lowest. Fully taking
advantage of the latest interdisciplinary and international research, theexhibits show the critical role that slavery and the enslaved played in thedevelopment of the Atlantic World and the American Republic. The next

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section, Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation
1877–1968, covers the new type of oppression that African Americans
faced, against which they forged a more organized front. Displays such as asegregated railroad car of the Southern Railroad Company vividly illustrate
the troubled life of “second-class” citizens. The last section of the History
Galleries, A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond, traces the progress aswell as remaining challenges of the last fifty years. For example, the lastexhibitions juxtapose Obama’s presidency and the Black Lives Mattermovement triggered by the Ferguson incident (police shooting of Michael
Brown) in 2014.
The Community Galleries show ways in which African Americans
painstakingly have created their own communities, cultivating their own
sense of place and identity. For example, The Power of Place exhibit focuseson the local histories of ten communities such as Lyles Station, Indiana,
settled by free black pioneers in the antebellum period and flourished as asegregated but viable rural farm town with its own institutions in the latenineteenth century. The exhibit also includes cities such as Chicago, agrowing black metropolis at the turn of the twentieth century that gave birth
to the uncompromising African American newspaper the Chicago Defender.
Such detailed displays of individual and collective efforts for betterment
against racism help visitors see the aspiration and despair that African
Americans long experienced.
The Culture Galleries on the top floor cover various genres of African
American cultural creativity, characterized by innovation, improvisation,and exchange: Cultural Expressions, Musical Crossroads, Taking the Stage,and Visual Art and the American Experience. Arrays of colorful costumes
and other entertainment displays dominate the galleries, while explanatory
plaques help visitors historicize each artifact and the resiliency of the artists.
For example, while admiring the beautiful ensemble dress that Marian
Anderson wore for her concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, visitors
also learn about the event’s significance, as she broke down the segregationof the capital and America’s stance on race in the following decades.
These staggering exhibits themselves surely provide visitors with apellucid vision of the indispensability of African American experience to thelarger American society. Not only the size of the collection but also thecareful use of the vision statement and of Bunch’s philosophy contribute tothis effect. At the same time, if we carefully look at each artifact andexplanation panel, we can discern that the NMAAHC combines threedifferent approaches to carry out its mission. In the next section, I elaborate

100    Akiko Ochiaion the museum’s accomplishments as well as its continuing challenges inpromoting the African American “new integration.”
One Museum with Many FacesA.

Identity Museum

Inviting all Americans to reconsider their national past for a better future,
the NMAAHC puts more emphasis on “American” than on “African,”taking a different curatorial position from that of the Charles H. WrightMuseum in Detroit, whose main permanent exhibition And Still We Rise
retells African American history from “our” African American point ofview.48
For those African Americans whose predecessors tirelessly sought its
construction, the NMAAHC is largely an extension of the African Americanneighborhood museum movement, as well as an overdue recognition of“their” dignity. Surely, the distinctive “dark” architectural design and thevery beginning exhibit of the century-long history of the museum’s founding
would give an African American visitor the impression that the NMAAHC
functions as “one of the few places on earth that tells the complete story of
my existence as a black person,” as Michelle Obama saw it.49 Howard
Dodson, former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, celebrates the NMAAHC as “a place of our own” located on “aniconic part of America’s national heritage landscape.”50 These African
American remarks support Charles Taylor’s argument that a person or agroup’s identity formation intertwines with recognition (and its antipode,misrecognition) from the majority population. Many African Americans
proudly and amicably call the NMAAHC “the Blacksonian,” a shorthandnickname particularly popular on social media.51
By contrast, Lonnie Bunch has repeatedly displayed discomfort with thename “Blacksonian.” Bunch demurs, “This is not a black museum. This is amuseum that uses one culture to understand what it means to be an
American.”52 Another art curator of the NMAAHC carefully articulates:“We aren’t trying to establish an ‘African American art canon’” but are“working to erase that type of illogical racial categorization” because “all of
the art in our galleries expresses the beauty, struggles, triumphs, and historyof American experiences in some shape or form.”53 As Andrea Burns points
out, Bunch and his staff probably had much to learn from the negative
example of the NMAI, which is sometimes cynically called the national

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101“tribal” museum because of its strong indigenous identity and multifaceted
non-Western worldview.54 The NMAAHC’s stance, softening its racial color
to appeal to a larger audience, received negative reviews from African
Americans who are critical of systemic racism that is still profound in thenation. For example, African American journalist Vann R. Newkirk II goesso far as to say that the NMAAHC “muddles and undermines the interracial
narrative of progress that undergirds the American nationalist project.”55
For others, “Blacksonian” has different connotations. Vocal whitemuseum critic Edward Rothstein lauds the NMAAHC as “a premier
example” of the identity museum, which he defines as “devoted torecounting the struggles and triumphs of a people whose place in the larger
society is, at first, barely tolerated. They . . . then gradually carve a place forthemselves—discovering their identity.”56 However, such museums create
problems when they “disguise obvious differences and define a single
identity” for their celebratory collective memory and identity, disfiguring it
through “simplification and even delusion.”57
Actually, it is not difficult for a person familiar with African American
history and basic academic historiography to discern omissions or
generalizations in the NMAAHC exhibits. For instance, in the section
focusing on the late 1960s, communitarian aspects of the Black Panther
Party and other revolutionaries overshadow their violent black nationalist
side. The NMAAHC is also conspicuously silent about contemporary
African American conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice ClarenceThomas, the AIDS epidemic among the African American community, andthe Critical Race Theory. The Culture Galleries’ celebratory displays
overwhelm any careful descriptions.58 This means that “African American
lenses” sometimes blur historical facts that seem too confrontational or lessrelevant to the dominant African American memory and identity. The
contrasting criticisms by Newkirk and Rothstein epitomize the tightrope that
the NMAAHC must traverse between racial identity and the broad
nationalistic appeal expected of a federally funded ethnic museum.
Although Bunch aims to “centralize the narrative of African American
history in a manner that is ripe with meaning, ambiguity, and complexity,”59
the ironical resonance between the traditional American Story and the story
depicted by the NMAAHC threatens not only the uniqueness and originalityof the museum but also that of the people it represents. The traditional
American Story exalts the myth of progress, of overcoming challenges anddifficulties to emerge triumphant. If the NMAAHC story borrows tooheavily from the myth of progress, in overcoming challenges and difficulties

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in moving from slavery to freedom even while it makes itself acceptable to
the general American public, it loses the chance to fundamentally challenge
the dominant national mythology. In representing the Nazi past of
Nuremberg, Sharon Macdonald defines “difficult heritage” as “a pastthat is recognised as meaningful in the present but that is also contested
and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming
contemporary identity.”60 In our case, both African American identity and,more generally, American identity are challenged in the reorientation of thenational memory.
Whatever the NMAAHC is called, it risks reductionism unless it canmaster an acrobatic balancing act, a new integration gaining the approval ofboth non-African American visitors and African American visitors, whilesomehow fundamentally reconstructing the national memory.
B.

Emotional Museum

The concept of the emotional museum is endorsed by David Fleming,
director of the National Museums Liverpool, which include the International
Slavery Museum. The concept closely evolved with growing interest in“dark tourism”: museums, especially history museums, are expected toinclude the dark and often-neglected side of human history in order toadvance social justice.61
According to Jenny Kidd, the emotional museum poses “a radical
reconceptualisation” because it “seeks to foreground the emotional work
done in heritage interpretation practices, taking ownership of it within
institutions, rather than seeing it solely as an ‘outcome’ to be ‘experienced’by the visitor.”62 In other words, the emotional museum not only displays
exhibits with emotionally disturbing narratives and artifacts but also
empathetically engages and transforms its visitors. It tries to shake its
visitors out of their amnesia and anemia to wrestle with their difficult history
as well as its present legacies. For example, the International Slavery
Museum and other emotional museums in Britain often use atrocity
materials, such as the very shackles and chains that manacled Africans in thetrans-Atlantic slave trade. Those materials usually provoke visitors’ empathy
for the downtrodden and their indignation against inhumane practices,
opening up a new possibility for moral commitment.63
In the NMAAHC’s exhibits, especially those in the History Galleries,
visitors find the approach of the emotional museum. For example, theSlavery and Freedom section displays vivid evidence of the slave trade andA “New Integration” of Memory in the NMAAHC  

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forced labor: counterweights against human cargo from the wrecked slave
ship São José Paquete Africa found off the coast of South Africa and an
auction block stone on which the enslaved were forced to stand for theirsales in a Maryland town. In the Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom
section, visitors are disturbed not only by seeing the coffin of Emmett Till
but also by being confronted with hundreds of small plates inscribed with
the names of victims killed by brutal lynching.
As Geoffrey Cubitt shrewdly points out, however, some visitors’
temporary “emotional usurpation” does not last long after they go back totheir everyday lives; other problems include familiarity and overexposure tosuch materials, reductionist victimization of the enslaved, and distraction
from historical and contemporary contexts.64 The NMAAHC exhibits
consciously address these dangers and shortcomings. For example, placedalongside tiny shackles is a baby’s cradle, which provokes visitors’ emotions
by the juxtaposition of inhumanity and motherly humanity. Visitors are
moved by a linen cloth called “Ashley’s sack,” which an enslaved motherhurriedly packed along with a lock of her hair and some pecans and gave toher departing daughter, who was being sold elsewhere. (The family later
embroidered the story on the cloth.) The NMAAHC exhibits its lynching
nameplates in the context of the antilynching movement led by Ida
B. Wells-Barnett and others.
The NMAAHC also takes scrupulous care of visitors who are
overwhelmed with anger, sadness, or sheer shock. Throughout the exhibition
space, trained docents are ready to assist those emotionally overwrought
visitors; at the Reflections Booth visitors are welcomed to share their stories
and thoughts; and at the Contemplative Court, visitors can sit down to
meditate or calm down while watching the cleansing streams of the Oculus
Fountain (fig. 2).65 Although it is hard to measure their effect on visitors’transformative experiences toward memory reconstruction and racialhealing, and the risks Cubitt points out do remain, this approach certainly
resonates with Bunch’s ideal of humanization.
C. Memorabilia Museum
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines “memorabilia” as“things that people collect because they once belonged to a famous person,
or because they are connected with a particular interesting place, event or
activity.” Brief net surfing easily leads to numerous museums that boast“memorabilia” collections, such as the Cedartown Museum of Coca-Cola

104    Akiko Ochiai

Figure 2. The Oculus Fountain at the Contemplative Court

Memorabilia in Cedartown, Georgia, and the Burlingame Museum of Pez
Memorabilia in Burlingame, California. Most memorabilia museums value
the entertaining and recreational aspects of their collections themselves overthe historical contexts or social meanings that those collections convey, witha few exceptions like the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia in Big
Rapids, Michigan. In a sense, all of the heavily artifact-based Smithsonian
museums, nicknamed collectively “the national attic,” could be called hugememorabilia museums. Visitors’ impressions of the NMAAHC upper floors
clearly reflect this tendency.
As mentioned, Bunch makes it a principle to seek “the right tension
between moments of pain and stories of resiliency and uplift.”66 Thisbalance is sought not within each exhibition floor, however, but across all
floors overall.
On the low-ceilinged, dimly lit underground floors, visitors move throughthe exhibitions of slavery and segregation full of atrocity material artifacts ina somber mood; on the more spacious and brighter upper floors, they smileand even revel at the remarkable historical journey as well as the energetic
cultural creativity of African Americans. State-of-the-art multimedia
technology and other interactive devices, as well as inspiring artifacts andcolorful pictures of celebrities, command the Cultural Galleries. In theMusical Crossroads section, it is rather difficult to find a visitor notA “New Integration” of Memory in the NMAAHC  

105

humming a tune or swaying to the music. Consequently, these galleries
create an aura of celebration, despite some contextualized explanations ofracism. Social justice advocate and journalist Eithne Nightingale relates
feeling “dizzy” surrounded by memorabilia such as Chuck Berry’s red
Cadillac and the P-Funk Mothership.67 Even public historian William
Walker experienced these sections as a kind of “dessert.”68 Surely, theCultural Galleries may inspire African American visitors who feel frustrated
or helpless with persistent racism in their own lives. Overall, visitors
experience “the gamut of emotions” with elation at the end of the visit.69
The upbeat ending of the museum tour unwittingly avows morality andmarkedly contrasts with the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool,which concludes with strong moral messages inveighing against
contemporary slavery and other inhumane activities. At the media preview,
African American social critic Steven W. Thrasher barely concealed his
cynicism, commenting that the NMAAHC is “truly joyous . . . with adult
black journalists from around the country as giddy as kids going toDisneyland.”70 Indeed, these “spectacular, immediately accessible andenjoy[able]” exhibitions are what a management professor recommends
museums adopt from theme parks as a viable possible marketing approach.71
Long lines in front of the gift shops also suggest the commodification ofhistory and the dilettantism of its visitors, both of which offset the moral
indignation and responsibility visitors feel on the lower floors. Memory
historian Bernard Armada warns of a similar “consumptive entertainment”
tendency in the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.72
Armada also points out that exhibits with excessive artifacts and multimedia
displays cause “sensory overload” that discourages visitors from“engag[ing] meaningfully the idea of the personal responsibility for social
activism.”73
As if to redress the balance, the NMAAHC has been holding thoughtprovoking lectures, symposia, and film screenings almost every week. For
example, during its first six months, it screened eight films including 13th,
BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, and Moonlight.74 In May 2017, when a noose wasfound in a room that dealt with KKK activities, Bunch immediately made apublic statement declaring his museum proactive for social justice: “Thiswas a horrible act, but a stark reminder of why our work is so important.”75
Ironically, sporadic racially motivated incidents like this dampen thecelebratory mood. So far, the NMAAHC uniquely integrates entertaining
memorabilia with somber topics, maintaining a fine balance in thisdichotomy.

106    Akiko Ochiai

Conclusion
Although the Trump presidency has aggravated the racial divide in
American society, the NMAAHC’s visitors far exceeded the two million
mark that the NMAI achieved during its first year. In contrast to the average
75 to 120 minutes that visitors spend at other Smithsonian museums, many
people spend up to six hours at the NMAAHC, proving the depth as well as
breadth of its appeal of African American experience.76 As noted, the visionsof the national African American museum were different in each period of
activism. Thus, the NMAAHC carries expectations and legacies from thepast, while its own history critically reflects the long way to the “newintegration” of the national memory.
To endorse this new integration, Lonnie Bunch and his staff developed the
NMAAHC as a lens through which visitors can re-view their own past,present, and future as well as their nation’s. He has well utilized his uniqueexpertise in building the NMAAHC: artifacts are carefully contextualizedwith real tear-jerking and laugh-provoking human stories. Employing theapproaches of identity museums, emotional museums, and memorabilia
museums, the NMAAHC attracts diverse visitors to its sophisticated andappealing exhibits. Its focus requires a delicate balance, however, between
African American identity and broad Americanism, between transformative
emotional engagement and temporary emotional clutter, and between
morality and entertainment. Even a slight imbalance risks downplaying thevery vision that the NMAAHC endorses, resulting in loss of focus or“cracks” in its lens.
What can we see through this clear polished lens? By reconstructing thenational memory in intriguing ways, will the NMAAHC lead to a more
inclusive future, eventual healing, and racial reconciliation? In his review,
Ken Burns compares the NMAAHC to his documentary film Jazz andBunch and his African American predecessors to jazz musicians whoinvented and improvised jazz in a racially strained environment: jazz“negotiates and reconciles the contradictions many of us would rather
ignore.”77 Therein we find glimpses of “our oft-neglected conscience, amessage of hope and transcendence for all people, of affirmation in the faceof adversity.”78 Perhaps we cannot yet fully understand the complicatedmelodies and rhythms of the NMAAHC that Bunch and his staff
continuously improvise.
At the White House reception held before the dedication ceremony,
President Obama appreciated Bunch’s leadership and staff teamwork, saying

A “New Integration” of Memory in the NMAAHC  107

the NMAAHC “could not have been done without the persistence, thewisdom, the dedication, the savvy, the ability to make people feel guilty . . .
the begging, the deal making, and just the general street smarts of Lonnie
and his entire team.”79 As Bunch himself once confessed, “You cannot be adirector at a place like the Smithsonian without being political.”80 So the
future of NMAAHC and racial reconciliation will be closely tied to Bunch’s
effective political improvisation in which visitors find themselves involved
through their engagement. After all, construction of public memory,especially on the Mall, has always been a contested political endeavor.
Moreover, as one gallery’s name, Making a Way Out of No Way, implies,
political improvisation has been the African American tradition—probably
the best strategy for navigating “postracial” streams toward a more inclusive
society.
Notes
NMAAHC homepage, https://nmaahc.si.edu.
Ibid.
3
The quotation is from Barack Obama’s speech at the opening dedication ceremony. See“Highlights from Our Dedication Ceremony,” NMAAHC, https://nmaahc.si.edu/dedicationhighlights (hereafter cited as “Highlights”).
4
The museum eventually established as the NMAAHC was called numerous names overthe century. Bridging those names, I will use the term “national African American museum”
except when referring to specifically proposed museums.
5
Vinson Cunningham, “A Darker Presence,” New Yorker, August 29, 2016, 35.
6
Lonnie G. Bunch III, “Making a Way Out of No Way,” Smithsonian Magazine, September
2016, 30.
7Lonnie G. Bunch III, Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on History, Race and Museums(Washington, DC: AAM Press, 2010), 69–70.
8
The quotation is from Lonnie Bunch’s speech in “Highlights.”
9Faun Rice, “National Museum of African American History and Culture: A New
Integration?” Curator 60, no. 2 (2017): 256 (hereafter cited as Rice, “NMAAHC”).
10
Paul A. Shackel, Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the PostBellum Landscape (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2003); and Kirk Savage, Standing
Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
11
Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
12James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough
Stuff of American Memory (New York: New Press, 2006); and Julia Rose, Interpreting
Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
13
Fath Davis Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost: Ethnic Museums on the Mall, Pt. 1: The
National Holocaust Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian,” Radical
History Review 68 (1997): 79–100; Fath Davis Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost, Pt. 2:
The National African-American Museum Project,” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 78–
1
2

108    Akiko Ochiai
101; and Akiko Ochiai, “‘Jinshu no Gajo’ kara ‘Wakai no Ba’ e: Kokuritsu Afurikakei
Amerikajin Rekishi Bunka Hakubutsukan no Setsuritsu” [From a “stronghold of race” to a“place for racial healing”: The establishment of the National Museum of African American
History and Culture], in Gendai Amerika no Seijibunka to Sekai [The political culture ofmodern America and the world: From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present],ed. Yoshio Higomoto, Ryo Yamazumi, and Toru Onozawa (Kyoto: Showado, 2010), 210–34.
See also Akiko Ochiai, “‘Kokujin Monogatari’ wo Kataru Ba wo Motomete: Kokuritsu
Hakubutsukan no Kensetsuchi wo Meguru Kioku no Poritikusu” [In search of a site for the“African American story”: Memory politics over the National Museum of African American
History and Culture], Journal of the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies[Tohoku University] 17 (2009): 15–29.
14
Robert L. Wilkins, Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100-Year Mission to Create the
National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC: Proud Legacy
Publishing, 2016).
15
Ibid., 15–30. On the racialized sectional reconciliation between the North and South, see,e.g., David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
16
Pub. Res. 70–107, 45 Stat. 1699–70 (1929).
17
Wilkins, Long Road, 31–46. On African American struggles to secure their public spheresin this period, see Wilson, Negro Building, 84–190.
18
On the development of the DuSable Museum and the Charles H. Wright Museum, seeWilson, Negro Building, 242–96. African Americans in the Washington area established aneighborhood museum affiliated with the Smithsonian; it is now called the Anacostia
Community Museum. See Kylie Message, Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest(New York: Routledge, 2013), 196–225.
19
Wilkins, Long Road, 47–55; and John Fleming, “African-American Museums, History,
and the American Ideal,” Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994): 1020–26.
20
Wilkins, Long Road, 57–59; and Ochiai, “Jinshu,” 214–15.
21
Ruffins, “Culture Wars, Pt. 2,” 80–96; Wilkins, Long Road, 59–68; and Ochiai, “Jinshu,”
215–21.
22
These words are found in Legislation to Establish within the Smithsonian Institution a
National Museum of African-American History and Culture, H.R. 2205, 108th Cong., 1stsess. (July 9, 2003), 5, 8, 10, 28, 59.
23
Wilkins, Long Road, 67–123; Ochiai, “Jinshu,” 221–24; and Lynette Clemetson, “Long
Quest, Unlikely Allies: Black Museum Nears Reality,” New York Times, June 29, 2003.
24
On the development of the forum-type museum, see, e.g., Spencer R. Crew, “Involving
the Community: The Museum as Forum for Dialogue and Learning,” in The Manual ofMuseum Learning, ed. Barry Lord (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 107–33.
25
Shelly Campo, Teresa Mastin, and M. Somjen Frazer, “Predicting and Explaining Public
Opinion Regarding U.S. Slavery Reparations,” Harvard Journal of Communications 15, no. 2(2004): 115–30, esp. 124.
26
National Museum of African American History and Culture Plan for Action Presidential
Commission, The Time Has Come: Report to the President and to the Congress (Washington,
DC: GPO, 2003), 41–43, 71–78; and Ochiai, “Jinshu,” 224–29.
27
Time Has Come, 17–20. See also Andrea A. Burns, From Storefront to Monument:
Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2013), 156–78, esp. 173–75.
28
Time Has Come, 1.
29
Wilkins, Long Road, 124. See also Philip Kennicott, “Look in, Step forward,” Washington
Post, September 22, 2016.

A “New Integration” of Memory in the NMAAHC  

109

30
Bunch, Call the Lost Dream Back, 17–29; and “Lonnie Bunch,” The History Makers,
September 5, 2003, http://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/lonnie-bunch-39.
31“About the Museum,” NMAAHC, https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/museum.
32
Ibid. On the four pillars, see also Mabel O. Wilson, Begin with the Past: Building the
National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Books, 2016), 44.
33
Bunch, Call the Lost Dream Back, 62.
34
Anthony Bogues, “This Museum Is about American Identity as Much as It Is about
African American History: An Interview with Lonnie Bunch,” Callaloo Art 38, no. 4 (2015):
705.
35
Lonnie G. Bunch III, “The National Museum of African American History and Culture:
The Vision,” Journal of Museum Education 42, no. 1 (2017): 10.
36
Bunch, “Making a Way Out of No Way,” 30.
37
Bunch, Call the Lost Dream Back, 69–70. See also Rice, “NMAAHC,” 249–58.
38
On the NMAAHC’s architectural aspects, see, e.g., Wilson, Begin with the Past, esp.
48–111; and Charles Henry Rowell, “Designing a Nation’s Museum: An Interview withDavid Adjaye,” Callaloo Art 38, no. 4 (2015): 763–69.
39
Bunch, Call the Lost Dream Back, 61–70; and Bogues, “This Museum,” 705–7.
40
The following observations of the exhibitions are based on my visit on September 25,
2016, supplemented by media reports and the NMAAHC homepage.
41
Bunch’s speech in “Highlights.”
42
Bunch, Call the Lost Dream Back, 36.
43Bunch, “National Museum of African American History and Culture,” 11.
44
Mike Boehm, “Founding Director Lonnie Bunch Reflects on the Journey of theSmithsonian’s African American Museum,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2014.
45
Ibid.
46
60 Minutes, “A Monumental Project,” CBS Broadcasting, May 17, 2015, http://www.
cbsnews.com/news/african-american-history-culture-smithsonian-institute-60-minutes.
47
Ibid.
48
On the And Still We Rise exhibit, see, e.g., Charles Pete Banner-Haley, “The Necessity of
Remembrance: A Review of the Museum of African American History,” American Quarterly
51, no. 2 (1999): 420–25.
49“Exclusive: Obamas Tour National Museum of African American History and Culture,”
ABC News, September 23, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/exclusive-obamastour-national-museum-african-american-history-42297238.
50
Howard Dodson, “A Place of Our Own: The National Museum of African American
History and Culture,” Callaloo Art 38, no. 4 (2015): 740, 736.
51
Markeshia Ricks, “The ‘Blacksonian’: A Way Out of No Way,” New Haven Independent,
October 20, 2016, http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/
blacksonian. On the politics of recognition, see Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “thePolitics of Recognition”: An Essay, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1992).
52
Cunningham, “Darker Presence,” 36.
53
Bridget R. Cooks, “Curating the National Museum of African American History andCulture: A Conversation with Tuliza Fleming and Jacquelyn Serwer,” Archives of American
Art Journal 55, no. 2 (2016): 74.
54
Burns, From Storefront to Monument, 172–73.
55
Vann R. Newkirk II, “How a Museum Reckons with Black Pain: The Smithsonian’s New
Memorial of African American History and Culture Is at Once Triumphant and Crushing,”
Atlantic, September 23, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/

110    Akiko Ochiai
national-museum-of-african-american-history-and-culture-smithsonian/501356. See also
Steven W. Thrasher, “The Smithsonian’s African American Museum: A Monument to
Respectability Politics,” Guardian, September 16, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/
culture/2016/sep/16/smithsonian-museum-african-american-history-respectability-politics.
56
Edward Rothstein, “Arts in Review: National Museum of African American History andCulture,” Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2016.
57
Edward Rothstein, “The Problem with Jewish Museums,” Mosaic, February 1, 2016,
https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2016/02/the-problem-with-jewish-museums. Rothstein
criticizes other ethnic museums for the same reasons.
58
See, e.g., Al Martin, “African-American History: Did Smithsonian’s New Museum Shun
Clarence Thomas?” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 25, 2016; Kennicott, “Look in,
Step forward”; and Rice, “NMAAHC,” 252–53.
59
Lonnie G. Bunch III, “‘All the Day, Every Day’: Reflections on Thirty Years ofInterpreting African American History,” foreword to Interpreting African American History
and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites, ed. Max van Balgooy (Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield, 2015), x.
60
Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and
Beyond (London: Routledge, 2008), 1.
61
See, e.g., David Fleming, “Human Rights Museums: An Overview,” Curator 55, no. 3(2012): 251–56; Richard Sandell and Eithne Nightingale, eds., Museums, Equality and Social
Justice (London: Routledge, 2012); and Karen Busby, Adam Muller, and Andrew Woolford,eds., The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015).
62
Jenny Kidd, introduction to Challenging History in the Museum: International
Perspectives, ed. Jenny Kidd, Sam Cairns, Alex Drago, Amy Ryall, and Miranda Stearn(Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 10.
63David Fleming, “The Emotional Museum: The Case of National Museums Liverpool,” inibid., 23–31.
64
Geoffrey Cubitt, “Atrocity Materials and the Representation of Transatlantic Slavery:
Problems, Strategies, and Reactions,” in Representing Enslavement and Abolition in
Museums: Ambiguous Engagement, ed. Laurajane Smith, Geoffrey Cubitt, Ross Wilson, andKalliopi Fouseki (London: Routledge, 2011), 229–59, quote at 247. See also Marcus Wood,
Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000).
65
Peggy McGlone, “300 Volunteers for African American Museum: ‘We’re Ready,’”
Washington Post, June 7, 2016. While Bunch took a cue for his Contemplative Court from theAnti-Japanese War Museum in Beijing, which has a memorial space for visitors to consider
what they learned from the exhibitions, he also sought consultation from the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. See
Bunch, Call the Lost Dream Back, 44; and Krissah Thompson, “Painful but Crucial Pieces ofHistory,” Washington Post, September 19, 2016.
66
Bunch, “Making a Way Out of No Way,” 28.
67
Eithne Nightingale, “‘At Last, I Am Free’: A Visit to the National Museum of African andAmerican History and Culture,” December 30, 2016, https://eithnenightingale.
com/2016/12/30/at-last-i-am-free-a-visit-to-the-national-museum-of-african-and-americanculture-and-history.
68
Will Walker, “A Visitor’s Observations on the National Museum of African American
History and Culture, Part 2,” National Council on Public History, June 1, 2017, http://ncph.
org/history-at-work/a-visitors-observations-on-the-national-museum-of-african-americanhistory-and-culture-part-ii.
69
Flash Wiley, “Understanding African-American History and Culture,” Boston Globe,

A “New Integration” of Memory in the NMAAHC  

111

October 4, 2016.
70
Thrasher, “Smithsonian’s African American Museum.” On the International Slavery
Museum and its exhibits, see Richard Benjamin and David Fleming, Transatlantic Slavery:
An Introduction (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011).
71
Alexandra Zbuchea, “Museums as Theme Parks: A Possible Marketing Approach?”Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy 3, no. 3 (2015): 504.
72
Bernard John Armada, “‘The Fierce Urgency Now’: Public Memory and Civic
Transformation at the National Civil Rights Museum” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State
University, 1999), 120.
73
Ibid., 115, 119.
74
“Recent Events,” NMAAHC, https://nmaahc.si.edu/calendar/recent; and “National
Museum of African American History and Culture Celebrates First Six Months,” NMAAHC,
March 24, 2017, https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/news/national-museum-african-americanhistory-and-culture-celebrates-first-six-months.
75
Clarence Williams and Peggy McGlone, “Noose Found at Exhibit in African American
Smithsonian Museum,” Washington Post, May 31, 2017. See also Lonnie G. Bunch III, “A
Noose Brings History to Life: Commentary,” New York Times, June 23, 2017; and Deirdre
Cross, “Talking about Social Justice in a National Museum,” Journal of Museum Education
42, no 1, (2017): 32–40.
76“National Museum of African American History and Culture Celebrates First Anniversary
with Festivities and Extended Hours Sept. 23–24,” NMAAHC, September 13, 2017,https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/news/national-museum-african-american-history-and-culturecelebrates-first-anniversary; and “National Museum of African American History and Culture
Reaches Milestone of 1 Million Visitors,” Newsdesk: Newsroom of the Smithsonian,February 21, 2017, http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/national-museum-african-americanhistory-and-culture-reaches-milestone-1-million-visitors.
77
Ken Burns, “Why the African American History Museum Belongs to All of Us,”
Washington Post Magazine, September 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/ken-burns-why-the-african-american-history-museum-belongs-to-all-of-us/2016/09/14.
78
Ibid.
79
Grand Foyer, “Remarks by the President at Reception in Honor of the National Museumof African American History and Culture,” September 23, 2016, the White House President
Barack Obama, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/23/remarkspresident-reception-honor-national-museum-african-american.
80
Graham Bowley, “Battle to Build an African-American Museum,” New York Times,
September 5, 2016.