For more information about the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, call 404-991-6970 or go to www.cchrpartnership.org/
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, a lens-shaped building dressed in a mosaic of buff-colored siding in the heart of tourist country downtown, is swarmed with cherry-pickers and front-end-loaders, their diesel engines disrupting the tranquility of a recent April afternoon.
Workers in hard-hats pace through the center’s atrium, guiding scissor-lifts toward the 40-foot ceiling, clambering over scaffolding, as they weld and hammer the building’s public face into shape.
There are still gaps in the space-age Trespa cladding on the exterior, and while the rudiments of some exhibits have been installed, the Pemberton Place attraction — adjacent to the World of Coke and the Georgia Aquarium — seems it will need double-shifts to be prepared for its late-May “soft opening.” But exhibit designer George C. Wolfe is adamant and confident when he says, “we’ll be ready.”
Says Bill Marks of Porter Novelli, a member of the center’s public relations team, who worked in communications for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, “You remember the Olympics? It all came together at the last minute.”
As the last minute approached, Wolfe and fellow exhibit designer David Mandel provided a recent tour through the building, showing how the center’s three major themes are balanced, and how the architecture and the content will interact in a lively dialogue.
From the atrium one can choose stairs (or an elevator) to the second level for the Human Rights exhibit, continue forward for the Civil Rights section, or go down to the quiet area in which the papers of Martin Luther King Jr. will be displayed.
Entering the portal to the Civil Rights section, one walks between two separate worlds, black and white, represented by photos of the segregated institutions of the day. On one side are the Atlanta Crackers, the all-white baseball team that played in Ponce de Leon Park. On the other, the Black Crackers, the Negro League team that played at Morehouse and Morris Brown when the white team had a home game.
In what will be one of the more high-impact rooms in this section is a replica of a burned-out bus, its side papered with photographs of individuals who participated in the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. Interactive components tell the stories of different members of the group.
On the other side of the room is a facsimile lunch counter where visitors can play the role of a sit-in protester. Headphones blast the guests with curses and threats, the kind of verbal abuse that protesters had to listen to 50 years ago. With hands on the Formica one can feel the footsteps of people creeping up behind. Remaining seated is a test of will.
Wolfe comes from the world of theater — he won Tony awards for directing “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Bring in ‘da Noise/Bring in ‘da Funk.” So his approach to museum design is a novel one.
“In theater,” he says, “you create a visceral response in the audience so that it makes them emotionally vulnerable to the information that you’re delivering,” he says. “It’s about making the story visceral.”
It is also about placing the story in human scale. In the Human Rights section, one floor up, are obelisks that will bear life-size portraits of the women and men “doing the hard dangerous work of human rights activism,” said Wolfe. On this day the image of Sussan Tahmasebi, a campaigner for women’s rights in Iran, is one of the few that has been installed.
On the bottom floor is the subdued area where the King papers will be displayed. Low lights will pick out phrases from King’s writings, carved into panels in the wall. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” reads one. Nine cases, which have not yet arrived, will contain rotating examples from Morehouse College’s 13,000-piece collection of the civil rights leader’s personal documents.
This will be a quieter locale, suited not just to visitors but to scholars conducting research. The low light and intimate space will also help in the effort to preserve the papers, which are vulnerable to light and humidity.
“It’s important to control the environment there,” said architect Phil Freelon. “That’s another reason to cloister it. And, in a way, by treating it in that manner, it gives it a sense of importance. It’s almost as if we are protecting it.”
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