New African American History Museum Opens in Charleston

The International African American Museum, in a former slave port, is about much more than slavery. It's about survival and resilience.

In Charleston Harbor, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired — Fort Sumter is visible from away — I'm at the site of an old shipping wharf known as Gadsden's Wharf. Here, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, ships carrying tens of thousands of enslaved Africans deposited their human cargo, a population that would, through unthinkable adversity and creative perseverance, completely transform what " America" ​​meant and meant.

At this spot now, looking a bit like a ship itself, stands the long-awaited new International African American Museum and long delayed. After a nearly quarter-century journey hampered by political upheavals, economic slumps, sometimes-mutinous crews and last-minute fogs, this cultural ship came safely and gracefully to dock here, opening to the public on Tuesday.

The new museum is indeed what this place is about: the original forced infusion of black cultural energy into America, and the implications of that for the present. It is the first major new museum of African American history in the country to fully showcase the entire Afro-Atlantic world, including Africa itself.

The museum's architecture, designed by Henry N. Cobb (1926-2020) with Moody Nolan's Curt Moody, responds to the institution's complex global-local agenda. Long horizontal block of beige sand bricks raised on solid piles, it evokes the image of a boat in dry dock. But it also suggests some sort of Afro-futuristic spaceship, hovering, ready to take off.

ImageView of the water and boats at Gadsden's Wharf from inside the museum. A chart by the window has information on historic landmarks visible from the window, such as Sullivan's Island and Fort Sumter.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

Beneath and around is a public park that the museum has named the African Ancestor Memorial Garden. It is clearly intended as a tribute to the victims of the torturous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Middle Passage, and more specifically to those who arrived, dead or alive, at this very place. Ghostly images – life-size silhouettes of bodies huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, as in the hold of a ship – seem to be etched into the garden sidewalk. Yet enveloping and softening, this sepulchral frieze is a sign of renewal and growth in the form of plantations, designed by the landscape architect Walter J. Hood, of lush vegetation: palm trees from Africa, sweet grass from Carolina from the South.< /p>

ImageAn area next to the museum marks the original boundary of Gadsden's Wharf. Water ebbs and flows over encased human figures made of local seashells.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times