African-American Museums, History, and the American Ideal

Abstract

In reviewing the results of the Journal ofAmerican History survey of Americanists, I was particularly intrigued by the number of respondents who thought that the American ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were the bright spots in American while intolerance, ethnocentrism, and racism were the dark spots. As I reflect on the responses to the survey, I realize that much of the of African Americans relates to the national struggle to achieve the American ideal while attempting to overcome what one can describe as the negative side of the American character. As I examined the survey responses, I pondered the role of museums in transmitting cultural values. Museums are truly unique institutions whose functions include collecting, preserving, documenting, and interpreting material culture. Their role as interpreters or educators brings museums to the forefront of institutions that transmit cultural values. How do museum professionals determine what lessons from the museum visitor should learn? This question is an ongoing one in every museum. It is certainly one faced by African-American museums as they try to balance how they interpret the relationship of bright spots and dark spots in American history. Within the last decade, African-American museums have emerged as important institutions concerned not only with American ideals and values but also with the relationship of those ideals and values to African Americans' efforts to survive as a people. In the past, before African Americans were aware of as a profession or discipline, our keepers of culture were griots -family and community elders who passed knowledge and values down from one generation to the next. In spite of the objective history of the nineteenthand early twentieth-century United States, which distorted and excluded black history, our griots preserved our historical traditions by passing on the community values that gave African Americans both their sense of identity and their sense of history. This communal view of transcended our bondage in America by reaching back to embrace the values and cultural mores rooted in the village culture of the African societies from which African Americans were wrenched to become chattel through the transatlantic slave trade.