Editor Travels to New African American Museum On Assignment
We have Skifters writing all over the place: editors in California, an editor in London, a research analyst in Berlin, and correspondents in Beijing, Singapore, and Cape Town. But to fill in the gaps, sometimes we send someone out on the road, and not necessarily halfway around the world. Some great stories are just a quick train ride away.
Two weeks ago, I — faithful blogger and assistant editor Sarah Enelow — went down to Washington, D.C. to see the newest Smithsonian, the wildly popular National Museum of African American History and Culture. The goal: see it firsthand and write a story about user experience and museums as powerful tourism drivers.
On a Friday morning, I boarded the 8:10 a.m. train from New York’s Penn Station, bound south for the nation’s capital. I settled into a window seat, tucked my black JanSport underneath, and pulled out my laptop. Out the window, the sun continued rising as we sped south past Trenton, New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware; and Baltimore, Maryland. After three and a half hours, we rolled into Washington, D.C.’s stately Union Station.
I exited into the crisp winter wind and took a ride-share straight to the African American museum, arriving at noon. I knew its facade well from photos and it loomed magnificent in-person, bronze in color and shaped to resemble a Yoruba crown. I pulled out my little red notebook and, as a chronic note-taker and list-maker, started jotting down my thoughts.
Truthfully this visit was more than just research — it meant a lot to me personally. My mother’s family tells a quintessential story of black America: from West Africa to the Mississippi Delta to Detroit and Chicago, from slavery to sharecropping to the auto industry. My mother was born in 1939 in Mississippi, during segregation, and when she was a young girl, the family fled the rural South for the urban North, where both freedoms and new problems awaited.
I began my tour, pen poised, on the lowermost floor with the transatlantic slave trade. The Middle Passage exhibit slowly evolved into slavery, which then became the era of my mother’s childhood and young adult life: Jim Crow. Since I’m only one generation away from this material, it hit extra close to home. Silky white Klan robes hung in one corner, Mammy figurines stared at me from another, and white actors in blackface leered in photos around the bend.
The Emmett Till memorial came next, and I steadied myself, already knowing the story. In 1955, as a young man of 14, Till traveled from his home in Chicago down to Mississippi, where he was unfamiliar with the local Jim Crow laws. He interacted informally with a white woman, then was kidnapped, lynched, and thrown into a river. When discovered, his body was unrecognizable. Till’s mother then made a now-famous decision — have an open-casket funeral so the world could see what Jim Crow was doing to us.
I grew up in rural Texas, surrounded by confederate flags and racial slurs, sometimes violence, and I’ll never forget the difference between South and North in this country. It’s not an accident that I no longer live in the South.
I reached the Black Power gallery right on time. The weight of earlier eras slowly lifted and I felt relieved to be rising chronologically through the museum rather than doing the reverse, literally walking away from darkness and into the light. I could see others feeling the same way — I saw an apple-cheeked young boy who couldn’t have been older than six standing in front of a display, making the Black Power salute while a man grinned with pride and photographed him.
After walking through the 1990s, my personal golden era of pop culture, I passed the Obamas and found myself in a spacious atrium with a cylindrical, light-filled waterfall in the center. I exhaled, slumped onto a bench, and recuperated, emotionally and from being on my feet for three hours. I just listened to the water gushing and pounding, hypnotically, beautifully.
It was also high time I ate, so I headed to the museum’s acclaimed Sweet Home Café and went straight for the crispy fried catfish — a staple of my southern upbringing. Seating was full and people sat family-style at long tables. I fell into a conversation with an older couple and we talked about human migration.
I spent five hours in the museum that day, well beyond my usual ceiling for museum fatigue. When I previously read that the museum’s dwell time could exceed six hours I was skeptical, but now understanding the experience, I believe it completely. In fact I left in a hurry to catch my train back to New York.
Could I have thoroughly researched the museum from my desk in New York? Yes. Could I have understood the depth of the user experience remotely? Especially when the experience is so emotional for so many visitors? I doubt it.
This is why Skift believes in putting boots on the ground when we can. Traveling is emotional, immersive, potentially life-changing. Sometimes you’ve just got to be there.
