HarryShearer.com

This week’s Supreme Court decision gutting the remainder of the Voting Rights Act can be—should be—seen as yet another toxic tendril growing through the generations from America’s original sin: chattel slavery. This is a moment when the very word “slavery” is under attack. The Administration has ordered the term removed from the Smithsonian and from memorial plaques in national parks. White folk in DC have been known to say “we built this city” when history tells us slaves built much of it. Trying to erase the memory of slavery has a long and venal history, starting when the North decided that a few years of Reconstruction were enough, and let the Southern states establish near-substitutes for their “peculiar institution”—particularly convict leasing. (Look it up; I had to)

Countering this attempt not to rewrite but to bury history is not the task just of the Black community. They are wisely focusing on raising their people up despite the vestiges of slavery, to fight in court and elsewhere for the basic rights most of the rest of us take for granted. We might well take the example of South Africa where, after decades of repression of the Black populace, Nelson Mandela helped to found a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to investigate and preserve the memory of what had gone before. That example would suggest that real reconciliation between the races in this country will not come until the real story, in all its stunning awful detail, is preserved and available to all Americans, presented in a research-informed and presentationally powerful way.

That’s the premise behind the National Slavery Museum. I’ve been speaking with individuals in New Orleans about this idea for many months. The notion is simple, and enormous, and expensive: an institution which aims to tell the whole story of slavery and its tendrils—convict leasing, redlining, neighborhood destruction, voter suppression, and more—that reach into our present life. New Orleans, I think, is the perfect place for such an institution. It has proven its ability to support an ambitious World War Two Museum, and, more importantly the city sits astride an historic fracture: both the site of one of the largest slave markets in the country, and the site, before the Civil War, of the largest population of free people of color.

Clearly, this week’s Supreme Court decision has motivated me to go public with this idea. Slowly gathering widespread community support is what I’ve been doing, but I think the moment calls for something more and more urgent..

One more thing: given recent history, my vision for the National Slavery Museum would involve no federal funding. And, since there are many institutions around the country that ably tell portions of this story, the NSM should reach out and amplify their findings in a cooperative, not competitive, venture.