To begin to grasp the breadth and depth of “America I AM: The African American Imprint,” the sprawling exhibition opening today at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center, it helps to know some numbers:
● 500 years of history covered, from “The Door of No Return,” which slaves departing Ghana passed through on their way to the New World, to video of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech.
● 22,000 square feet, nearly double the space at the exhibit’s first stop at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center.
● Nearly 300 artifacts, including more than 40 new to the show.
● 18 months to pull it all together after journalist Tavis Smiley had the brainstorm of an exhibit that would answer a provocative question scholar-activist W.E.B. DuBois posed in 1903: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”
That last figure “is a sore point for me,” executive producer John Fleming said this week as workers installed artifacts and aimed spotlights, his expression clearly one of pride rather than grievance. “The objects here were loaned by 90 individuals and institutions, and each one required its own negotiations. It was a job.”
“America I AM” is organized around four core themes: economic, socio-political, cultural and spiritual. Visitors will weave through 12 dramatically lit galleries, many featuring music and newsreel oratory, as these four “imprints” are explored in roughly chronological order.
Yet despite the great pains organizers have taken to tell a complex story with detailed historical context (in wall text and display descriptions) and razzle-dazzle multimedia, it’s the rich array of objects that people will be talking about long after they emerge from this history lesson.
A sampling includes:
● The key from the Alabama jail cell where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was held after the Birmingham campaign in 1963, and the stool upon which he wrote his Letter From Birmingham Jail.
“It was difficult getting King materials in Atlanta,” Fleming acknowledged. “We weren’t able to get anything out of the King Center or the King Papers. But what we have, from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, is impressive.”
● Middle Passage shackles used to control Africans on slave ships sailing to the Americas, and a pistol used to put down mutinies.
● A carved side chair and washstand by Thomas Day, a free black North Carolina furniture maker, established and selling to prominent whites by the 1820s.
● A circa 1845 League of Massachusetts Freemen billy club inscribed with instructions for members “to arm themselves when attempting to deal with slave hunters.”
● A mid-1800s frock coat worn by slave-turned-statesman Frederick Douglass.
● A silver and crystal inkstand given to abolitionist-author Harriet Beecher Stowe during a visit to England in 1853. One figure, holding a Bible, symbolizes religion giving freedom to a slave.
● An 1865 copy of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, including the signature of President Abraham Lincoln. It’s one of only 14 known copies.
● A black beaded dress worn by Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, in 1920s chic style.
● Malcolm X’s diary from his travels to Africa and Mecca in 1964.
● Rosa Parks’ fingerprint card from her arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery.
● Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet from the 1940s.
● A Brooklyn Dodgers jersey worn by Jackie Robinson during his final season, 1956.
● Muhammad Ali’s silken boxing robe that he wore while training for the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” match in Zaire against George Foreman.
● Alex Haley’s Smith Corona electric typewriter on which he typed the manuscript for “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” (1976).
● The purple guitar that Prince played during the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show.
● A handwritten poem on ruled notebook paper by Tupac Shakur titled “In the Event of My Demise.”
Fleming, director emeritus of the Cincinnati Museum Center, is well aware that several institutions across the country, from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, attempt to tell at least parts of the same story that “America I AM” covers. He feels, nonetheless, that the traveling show is a singular experience.
“The new, reinstalled exhibit at Detroit covers at least the same time period, but certainly not with the same depth we do. Plus they include a lot about Detroit, while our focus is national,” he says. “This is the only place where you’ll find all of these objects in one place, and that’s pretty unusual. It’s the largest African-American exhibit ever to travel.”
And until Sept. 6, it’s settled in the city where some of the more important chapters of that history were written.
Exhibit preview
“America I AM: The African American Imprint”
Through Sept. 6. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays and Fridays-Saturdays; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays.
Tickets (purchased for a specific date) are available at Ticketmaster.com or 1-800-745-3000. $12, adults; $5, ages 4-17; $8, age 65 and up and for groups of 10 or more. Discounted tickets ($10, adult; $4, children) are available at Wal-Mart stores throughout Georgia.
Audio tours narrated by Tavis Smiley and Princeton University scholar Cornel West, $4.
Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center, 395 Piedmont Ave., Atlanta 404-523-6275, www.americaiam.org.
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