DETROIT – We’re deep into what is, officially, Black History Month, and countless schoolchildren have had to read parts of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous speech, learn about Rosa Parks and maybe the Underground Railroad, or whatever else may be on the test.
Adults who aren’t teachers or journalists mostly tend to ignore it. But what if you could sample a bit of the struggles and journeys of African-Americans in a fascinating, even spellbinding way?
You really can do that at one of Detroit’s largest, and often most overlooked museums, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History, which staffers often just call “The Wright.”
The 22,000 square foot building on Warren Avenue, the largest African-American history museum in the nation, apart from the one the Smithsonian opened in 2016, is in walking distance of the far better known Detroit Institute of Arts – and far less visited.
But after some rocky early years in the late 1990s, when museum exhibits often promised more than they delivered and political squabbling may have interfered with programming, the Wright, which grew out of the private collection of a Detroit physician and author, Charles H. Wright, has improved to the point where it really is one of the Midwest’s undiscovered jewels.
That doesn’t mean the museum lacks controversy; anything that blends contemporary politics and race is bound to be controversial. This year, there have been protests over an exhibit on “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello,” which included a talk by Gayle Jessup White, whose DNA has shown is a descendant of President Jefferson – and Sally Hemings, a slave girl he owned and fathered children with.
Some black Detroiters thought the exhibit romanticized slavery and rape; the museum felt it was a true story that needed to be told.
But there are also fascinating, very well put together permanent exhibits on everything from the slave trade and the horrible “middle passage” to what life was like in Africa before the white man.
There are also exhibits – too many to see in one day – of the things African-Americans achieved in more modern times. (Did you know a black woman, Ann Lowe, secretly designed Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress? I didn’t.)
Jatu Gray (Mama Jatu), whose job title is full-time museum educator and storyteller for the Wright museum, sometimes sings the mournful songs slaves and sharecroppers sung as she guides visitors through the exhibits. Most Detroit public school children come with their teachers, and she conducts a different tour for the youngest ones, who may not be ready to see the full horrors of slavery.
She doesn’t mention that less than two centuries ago, many children their age not only saw, but lived through slavery’s worst horrors – floggings, lynchings, family separations.
She doesn’t have to.
“I tell the kids – you are the future,” says Jatu, a Chicago native who, at 63, is old enough to remember Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and the glory years of the civil rights movement.
“You have to remember this and ensure this never happens again,” she told me, as we stood in the Ford Freedom Rotunda that soars 55 feet into the air and is capped with a glass dome just slightly smaller than the one over the U.S. Capitol.
There are still people, some of African-American lineage, who roll their eyes at the notion of Black History Month, a custom that started as “Negro History Week,” and then caught on nationwide in the 1970s and was embraced by President Gerald Ford.
Some whites have denounced the whole idea as racist; there’s an old joke in the African-American community that February was Black History Month “because it’s the shortest month in the year. “
Morgan Freeman, the star of movies like Driving Miss Daisy and Glory, once famously said on 60 Minutes, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black History is American History.”
His words, however, are sometimes taken out of context; in the same interview, he said “you are going to relegate my history to a month? “ The actor has made it clear that he thought we all ought to know more about all our history as a nation and a people.
That’s what motivates those running the Wright Museum. They say the main difference between this and other months is that the Wright, normally closed on Monday, is open every single day during Black History Month.
Plus, for the next three days – today, tomorrow and Monday – admission is free; it’s normally $8 for adults and $5 for children and seniors.
Jatu Gray is proud of her heritage – but is careful to tell kids “there were kind white people that would help (us) back in the days of slavery who were called Quakers. And if you don’t know what that is, go to the supermarket and look for the oatmeal box.”
Nor does she think blacks have had a monopoly on suffering. Not long ago, she visited Michigan’s Holocaust Memorial Center in suburban Farmington Hills, which is also the largest museum of its kind apart from the one in Washington, D.C.
When she was looking at an exhibit about the death camps, she became overwhelmed, looked around and saw a Jewish woman who was reacting the same way. “I grabbed her and she grabbed me and we were just hugging and crying. We didn’t know each other at all.”
When she walked me out, Gray told me that we needed to get beyond defining each other by race, but added that, “first we have to know each other’s stories, and where we’ve been.”
