Visiting the African American Museum - February 9, 2018

It’s always a fascinating experience for me to visit DC museums.  I have been doing this as a “tour guide” living in DC for almost 43 years since 1975.  Perhaps, I’m not far from the Capital city.  Most of the time, I served as a chaperone for relatives, friends, and classmates when they visited me.  It’s great if you know your stimulating limits.  Otherwise, the experience can be an uncomfortable sensory overload from so many exhibits and so many items within exhibits.

When the kids were growing up, field trips from their schools or our own cultural immersion tours took most for us in terms of DC Museums.  After my retirement in 2014, I became a preferred loner to visit all these museums.  

I have done three personal visits to Holocaust museum myself so far, just wanting to know how oddly German American citizens engaged in WWII fighting against Nazi.  My son-in-law, background - Irish and German, his uncle served as an U.S. Allied war plane pilot.  Also, my daughter’s high school International Baccalaureate, IB 4,000 words research paper “How was Germany’s Aryan Empire developed” was so complicated that I felt intrigued as she, a senior, was writing it without getting sleep to meet the deadline in April 1996.

The new African American museum visit on Feb. 9, 2018, Friday was a little rushed for me.  Mimi, my tennis partner was not a book worm like I am.  She, also a retiree, has become quite an avid Civil War history reader ever since our adventurous trip to visit her son’s “White Tara Mansion” at Charleston, S. Carolina in February 2015.  I relayed in detail the fictional history book and movie, Gone with The Wind to her and the other travel companion, Jen-Jen during our 9.5 hours road trip to Charleston, S. Carolina.  

We traversed different battle grounds once we crossed the Potomac River from Maryland side to Virginia - The Antietam (MD), Fredericksburg, Manassas, Front Royal, Williamsburg, Yorktown, etc all buried with fallen soldiers of blue and gray colors from Civil War era, 1861 – 1865.  When the first cannon broke out in Sumter, S. Carolina, most of them were at the peak of their young lives (18 – 29 years old), full of feverish patriotism inspired by preserving the Union and defending their southern homesteads/plantations.  That was the bloodiest war in American History.

During that road trip, we let our imagination run wild trying to picture how the nation was torn apart between the North, and the South, the Union, and the Confederate, the Yankees and the Rebels, the white, and the black, the plantation owners and the slaves, whatever you would like to term it. 
Coming back to the reality, while we were talking about that trip, we thought about the enslaved African Americans have faced all this horrible and awesome adversity and still manage to reach where they are today.  I called it survival, endurance and courage.  

Unfortunately, we could not cover everything with such a short time. We wanted to avoid the subway traffic by 3:00 p.m.

As a first-time visitor, we were able to glace from the dark basement of three floors – C1, C2, and C3.  The museum’s façade looks like an anchored slave ship docking at the most prominent location, a stone throw from the Smithsonian Museum Castle.  It’s next to the Washington Monument overlooking the vast green sods fields of newly-landscaped U.S. National Mall.  The architectural designs intend to be seen by the visitors, local and world-wide, as a symbol of transformation from people who overcame the past humiliation and up-lift an entire race and superpower into what it is present.  The future generation will use this museum as an institution for research, training and education about the study of the darkest periods of African American History. 

For me, the dark basement two levels were most haunting.  It represents how the slave ships loading thousands of slaves west-ward toward America dated back 17^th century.   My emotion was moving goose-bumped when seeing the slave neck irons exhibition and the brutality of slave trading humans as cargo and commodities.   The punishment was raw before my eyes.   

It was a chilly gloomy morning and my mood inside was rather somber and depressed.      

I was surprised that there were less black visitors than other colors.  Most of them were adults.  There weren’t many school children either, maybe it’s school days.  I thought about my grand- child, a four-year-old, will one day study this heart-breaking history here and appreciate how lucky we are to be an American.

I will go back again myself.  I would like to focus on the civil right struggles and enjoy much of the glory days of their accomplishment in sports, arts, and media for the era of Black pride and power exhibited on the top floors.

Personally, I also thought about why Chinese Americans did not have complete historical records in museum about Nanking Massacre like the Holocaust museum.