[Mb-civic] A homecoming - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  A homecoming

By James Carroll  |  February 6, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

AMERICA HAS had a difficult time reckoning with its racist past. Slavery 
was a defining part of the cultures and economies out of which the 
nation grew, and for most of its first century the ownership of humans 
by other humans was taken for granted. A pseudo-Darwinian ranking by 
''race" justified that order, which stood on pillars of skin color and 
ethnic origin. When that blatant structure of denigration was overthrown 
by the Civil War, implicit assumptions of white supremacy remained so 
lodged in the national psyche that slavery became a half remembered 
shadow, with heirs of slave-holders in contented denial about its 
brutality and descendants of slaves locked in punishing marginality by 
means of legal insult and economic short shrift.

Failure to reckon with slavery and its consequences is still the 
American problem, which is manifest not only by the unyielding grip of 
white racism that impossibly burdens one generation of African-Americans 
after another, but also in the permanent cultural divide that so curses 
the nation. An inch below the surface of every political debate, from 
questions of law-and-order to the proper role of government to tax 
policy to educational reform, lies the hidden reality of race -- or, one 
should say, of white racism. North-South, Red State-Blue State, 
Democrat-Republican, urban-suburban, local-cosmopolitan, state-federal 
-- these inhibiting dichotomies all split along the primordial fracture 
of slavery and its aftermath.

As the mixed history of the affirmative action movement shows, even the 
most well-intentioned attempts to deal with this central conundrum get 
sidetracked, with the result, for example, that women and various 
immigrant groups defined as ''minority" have made impressive strides 
toward equality, while obstacles blocking such advancement for 
African-Americans, even after 50 years of civil rights, remain largely 
in place.

This is the heart-rending background to last week's welcome good news. 
The Smithsonian Institution announced the selection of a site for The 
National Museum of African American History and Culture. It will stand 
on one of the most prominent spots in the nation's capital, near the 
Washington Monument at the corner of Constitution Avenue and 14th 
Street, the boulevard of entrance to the city.

Most significantly, the museum will be on the National Mall, which is 
the axis of American memory and moral reckoning. Until now, the Mall 
itself has epitomized the nation's denial -- by what is absent. A 
discernible color line in the stone of the Washington Monument marks the 
halt in its construction during the Civil War, but that terrible 
conflict is remembered mainly as a white nation's fratricidal tragedy, 
with blacks included, if at all, in footnotes. Indeed, the Mall takes 
its sacred line from the link, across Memorial Bridge, between Robert E. 
Lee in Arlington and Abraham Lincoln in his marble temple -- as if the 
breach between those two white men were the most grievous wound in need 
of healing.

Over the years, it was African-Americans who most forthrightly claimed 
the National Mall as sanctuary for the nation, beginning in 1939 when 
75,000 people showed up (the largest Mall gathering ever until then) to 
hear Marian Anderson sing after she had been barred from Constitution 
Hall for being black. The radio broadcast of her concert was heard 
across the country, linking racial justice and that place in the 
American mind. That was what brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 
there in 1963, and it was why he aimed to return in 1968. Even without 
him that spring, the many thousands of his Poor Peoples' Campaign showed 
up on the Mall, claiming it as their Resurrection City. But, trekking 
through the dozens of monuments and museums that line the National Mall 
today, you would not know any of this. That will change now.

At the edge of the tidal basin, near the memorial to Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt, ground will be broken this year for a stand-alone memorial to 
King, whose words sacralized what Lincoln's gaze beholds. And across the 
Mall, at the gate of the city, will rise the National Museum of African 
American History and Culture, where the full truth of American history 
and culture can finally be told -- precisely because now it can include 
its African element. How we remember the past determines the future. The 
brutality of slavery, bold resistance of slaves, assumptions of white 
supremacy, triumphs of civil rights, and injustices yet to be reckoned 
with -- the full story told at last, completing the place that enshrines 
the national conscience.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/06/a_homecoming/
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