New Smithsonian museum chronicling black history opens

Speaking at Saturday’s dedication ceremony, Obama said the museum will give people a better understanding of themselves by teaching them about others – slaves, the poor, black activists, teachers.

CCTV America’s Sean Callebs reports.

President Barack Obama Saturday opened the country’s first museum devoted exclusively to African-American culture in Washington D.C. without mentioning a word about the ongoing unrest in USA cities following alleged police violence against blacks.

“It doesn’t gauze up some bygone era or avoid uncomfortable truths”, the president said in his weekly radio and internet talk, released before the opening of the museum.

“We’re not a burden on America, or a stain on America, or an object of pity or charity for America”.

“This is the place to understand how protests and love of country don´t merely coexist, but inform each other”, Obama said.

The president and first lady joined Bonner and her family in ringing a bell from the historic First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, Virginia, to signal that the museum was officially open.

On the heels of a tense and bloody week that brought racial inequality roaring to the national forefront once again, President Barack Obama on Saturday called on the country to reflect on its checkered past while celebrating the contributions of African-Americans.

Obama said the history displayed in the museum is “a story that perhaps needs to be told now more than ever”.

Inside, museum officials say they have almost 3,000 items occupying 85,000 square feet of exhibition space including exhibits like a Tuskegee Airmen training plane and the casket of Emmitt Till, a murdered African-American boy whose death helped rally the civil rights movement.

Bush signed the 2003 bill that authorized the museum; it initially met with congressional opposition because of cost.

Former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who co-sponsored legislation authorising the museum, were present at the ceremony. “Black and white and Latino and Native American and Asian American – see how our stories are bound together”, he said standing on a stage outside the bronze-colored, latticed museum.

Many celebrities came to the museum’s dedication as well, including Oprah Winfrey, who has donated more then $20 million to the museum. It will return to the church for its 240th anniversary later this year.

The 400,000-square-foot museum, designed by British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, strikes a unique shape on the Mall with its three-tiered bronze exterior panels inspired by an African wooden column.

Millions of donors, known and unknown, contributed to the $315m in private funding raised before the museum’s opening.

Expected to speak later in the day are actor Robert DeNiro, former President George W. Bush, civil rights icon John Lewis and finally Obama before he cuts the ribbon to open the museum. “But it can also help black visitors appreciate the fact that not only is this younger generation carrying on traditions of the past, but within the white communities across the nation, we see the sincerity of law enforcement officers and officials who, in fits and starts, are struggling to understand and trying to do the right thing”, he said. “We shouldn’t despair that it’s not all solved”, Obama said, noting all the progress that the country has made just in his lifetime.