Centuries of struggles and strife, decades of planning and pain, and years of hoping for a place that African-American history can call home reached an end as U.S. President Barack Obama officially opened the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
A shining beacon on the National Mall, steps away from a monument dedicated to a slaveholder president, the new Smithsonian will chronicle the complex relationship between the United States and a people it once enslaved, and tells the story of those who worked to make the necessary changes to bring the country to where it is today.
“It doesn’t gauze up some bygone era or avoid uncomfortable truths,” Obama said in his weekly radio and internet talk. “Rather, it embraces the patriotic recognition that America is a constant work in progress, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is within our collective power to align this nation with the high ideals of our founding.”
Inside the museum, there are nearly 3,000 items occupying 85,000 square feet of exhibition space.
Exhibit include a Tuskegee Airmen training plane and the casket of Emmitt Till, a murdered African-American boy whose death helped rally the civil rights movement. — AP
