POLITICO, February 22, 2012 -- President Barack Obama Wednesday kicked off the groundbreaking of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, explicitly linking his own family to the history of African-Americans and invoking the rhetoric of the civil rights movement.
“I want my daughters to see the shackles that bound slaves’ voyage across the ocean and the shards of glass that flew from the 16th Street Baptist Church, and understand that injustice and evil exist in the world,” Obama said at the event. “But I also want them to hear Louis Armstrong’s horn and learn about the Negro League and read the poems of Phillis Wheatley.”
He did not, however, explicitly reflect on the fact that he was presiding over the construction of a national museum dedicated to African-American history as the first African-American president.
Obama said the museum “should stand as proof that the most important things in life rarely come quickly or easily; it should remind us that although we have yet to reach the mountaintop, we cannot stop climbing.”
Obama reminded the crowd of the history that had led them to that point, connecting it to the location of the new museum — expected to open in 2015 at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue on the National Mall.
“It was on this ground long ago that lives were once traded, where hundreds of thousands once marched for jobs and for freedom. It was here that the pillars of democracy were built, often by black hands,” Obama said. “And it is on this spot, alongside the monuments to those who gave birth to this nation and those who worked so hard to perfect it, that generations will remember the sometimes difficult, often inspirational but always central role that African Americans have played in the life of our country.”
First lady Michelle Obama, also at the event, sat beside John Lewis, the Georgia congressman who as a young civil rights activist worked with Martin Luther King Jr. Former first lady Laura Bush, a member of the museum’s advisory council, was also at the event.
“This is an idea whose time has come,” said Lewis, who spent much of his congressional career introducing bills to create the museum before George W. Bush signed legislation in 2003 approving the $500 million project.
Obama had some brushes with discussions of race early in his presidency but has largely steered clear of discussing his race and racial dynamics in modern America. His off-the-cuff comment that the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a reminder that “race remains a factor in this society” escalated into a major national debate in the summer of 2009 that ended with a “beer summit” at the White House.
He did, though, pay tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. last fall at the dedication of the Washington memorial to the civil rights leader. In January, Obama said that Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that Obama was a “food stamp president” were “tapping into some of our worst instincts,” though the president didn’t say what instincts those were.
The museum will be a place where the struggles of the civil rights movement will be memorialized long after the witnesses to the upheaval have died, Obama said.
“The time will come when few people remember drinking from a colored water fountain, or boarding a segregated bus or hearing in person Dr. King’s voice boom down from the Lincoln Memorial,” he said. “That’s why what we built here won’t just be an achievement for our time, it will be a monument for all time. It will do more than simply keep those memories alive.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Thursday, February 23rd 2012 at 10:28AM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
