A few years ago I visited the National Museum of African American History & Culture with my grandparents. When we stepped out of the building my grandmother kept repeating the words “I lived it. I lived it. I lived it.”
She’s still here. That history is still in her bones. You can never erase that.
My grandfather was born in 1930s Mississippi, my grandmother in 1930s Florida. They, like millions of other Black Americans, remember living in an era of racial apartheid in the American South. It is a history that the NMAAHC captures with rigor, with honesty, with humanity. It is essential.
Ruth Bonner, the woman who helped open the NMAAHC in 2016, was the *daughter* of a man born into slavery.
My grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved.
One of the most essential functions of the museum, is that it shows us how the history we’ve been told was long ago was actually not long ago at all.
Mar 28, 2025 15:58
