I first visited the Smithsonian around 1971 with my class from St. Brigid’s Elementary School in Westbury, New York. I loved it because I loved history. It was not until I went back a few years later that I noticed that almost nothing in there had anything to do with Black people. Then, for a number of years, I refused to visit again. When I heard that the museum had acquired the Woolworth lunch counter associated with one of the early direct action protests against segregation, I visited and was impressed all over again. Since then I have been to the history museum a number of times with my family or while on business trips to Washington.
The New York Times has a good story today on how the Smithsonian is expanding its work of looking into the history of slavery in the United States and of the slave trade that fed that institution of violent exploitation. The article starts with a personal experience of the Smithsonian Institution’s head Lonnie Bunch. Here is what it says:
On a Sunday stroll up 16th Street in Washington, D.C., years ago, Lonnie Bunch got a hug and a gentle talking-to from an African American woman.
Mr. Bunch — who at the time was the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, which was still under construction, and now heads the entire Smithsonian Institution — had been very visible in the media discussing the newest of the Smithsonian museums.
“She came up to me and said, ‘I know who you are,’ and she hugged me,” Mr. Bunch said with a chuckle. “And she basically said, ‘I am so proud of what you are doing, but please don’t talk about slavery. You have an opportunity not to have a generation tarred by slavery.’ I thought that was very powerful.”
What struck Mr. Bunch about this was that it echoed other conversations he had been having on the topic: Some people did not want the museum to talk about slavery, but others did.
When the museum opened in 2017, so did the Center for the Study of Global Slavery within it. The center’s work focuses on three international collaborative initiatives: the Slave Wrecks Project, the Global Curatorial Project and the Slave Voyages Consortium.
The Slave Wrecks Project helps coordinate searches for sunken slave ships and works on maritime archaeological research and historical recovery. This month in Senegal, the inaugural Slave Wrecks Project Academy’s cohort of African and diaspora students are being trained in diving and learning about the global slave trade. The center also works with slavevoyages.org to help expand data collection beyond the trans-Atlantic slave trade and is working to broaden research into both the Indian Ocean and inter-American slave trades.
Under the auspices of the Global Curatorial Project, a number of partner institutions — including Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum, Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town and Belgium’s Royal Museum of Central Africa — are in the midst of putting together In Slavery’s Wake, a traveling exhibition that will open first at the museum in Washington in late 2024 and then move to Africa, Europe and the Americas.
The center will be hosting an event in Lisbon, Portugal in January with a tentative title, “Reckoning with Race: The social memory of the slave trade in our world,” that will aim to bring more public attention to the role that Portugal played in the slave trade. Mr. Bunch will be one of the event’s speakers.
“We wanted to crack open the sense that this is just a story that is limited to, as most Americans understand it, this period around the American South just prior to the Civil War,” said Paul Gardullo, the center’s director. “We don’t have a great sense in America of the international complexities of this massive story that shaped our world.
“Even outside of the Atlantic world, the work of slavery and colonialism was shaping markets in Asia, it was building the capitals of Europe. These are things that need to be explored more fully.”
The ethos at the heart of the center has always been about global collaborations and trying to tell a broader story of slavery. “As good as the Smithsonian is, it doesn’t have broad enough shoulders to do everything,” Mr. Bunch said, “and really it is such a complicated, nuanced story from so many lenses that it would only work if you had those lenses.”
The Slave Wrecks Project lens grew out of an existing collaboration between Iziko Museums of South Africa, the U.S. National Park Service and George Washington University. At the time the Smithsonian, on the insistence of Mr. Bunch to find remnants of a slave ship, reached out to the group to see if any of the shipwrecks they were diving for were involved in the slave trade. (It is estimated that more than 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries, and of those estimated 36,000 voyages, 1,000 ships likely sank).
Coincidentally, they were exploring the São José, a Portuguese slave ship on its way from Mozambique to Brazil that wrecked off Cape Town in 1794.
The Smithsonian was intrigued with their research. The Slave Wrecks Project now also includes Diving With a Purpose, which aims to find and document shipwrecks related to the slave trade, with a particular focus on training divers from the African diaspora.
Being connected with the center “opens up avenues of research that if I were to do stuff on my own could have been a lot more difficult,” said Jaco Boshoff, a maritime archaeologist at Iziko Museums of South Africa and a co-founder of the Slave Wrecks Project….
You can read the rest of the article at the link given above.
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