Former Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. at the International African American Museum’s multimedia ‘Transatlantic Experience’ gallery. | Courtesy Joseph P. Riley Jr. and the Charleston City Paper.
(Editor’s note: One of the most significant museums of our nation opened recently in Charleston, S.C. Because of its importance, GwinnettForum is devoting its entire editorial space today to this subject. It is a particularly fitting story to be published on July 4, 2023, the 247th year since our country’s founding.—eeb).
By Andy Brack
Editor and publisher, Charleston City Paper
CHARLESTON, S.C. | Several hundred people were the first paying visitors June 27 as the International African American Museum opened 23 years after first being dreamed of by former Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr.
Brack
As of July 3, tickets were sold out until July 11 for tours of the new attraction built on Gadsden’s Wharf, a site where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans got off cramped, dirty slaving ships bound for Charleston.
At a June 24 dedication featuring about 500 luminaries, Riley beamed as he described the importance of the $125 million museum.
“This museum that we open today is a gift to our country and a gift to each of us and our future,” he said, adding it would be integral to telling often-ignored African American history that had not been told in a place where it happened. “[Professor] Henry Louis Gates called Charleston the ‘ground zero’ in the African American experience and indeed it is. “
At a nearby community celebration at Marion Square, current Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg said the new museum as a living edifice that would “rekindle the promise of America all over the world” through its deeply moving American stories and connections. “We can all bear witness in the heartbreak and the hope that is its legacy.”
In 1998, Riley read author Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, which tells the story of his slave-holding South Carolina family. Riley quickly resolved to have a place to tell the story of the African American experience. The project was announced in 2000.
“We are here,” IAAM President and CEO Dr. Tonya M. Matthews said in a June 24 welcome, “to reimagine [history] and to tell one of the greatest stories of struggle of all time.”
Click to read stories about the museum and the impact of enslaved Africans and their descendants on America.
The stories of struggle of African Americans in Charleston and across the continent will be reimagined and told at the museum, unlike past generations when stories were untold, unspoken, hidden, erased and denied, she said.
“Stories are seeds and seeds sprout as roses that invite you to lean in. … The seeds have been planted. Let us till this soil. Welcome to the International African American Museum.”
Michael B. Moore, the museum’s founding president and CEO who is now running for Congress, said the IAAM’s opening was emotionally overwhelming.
“To create an institution that elevates the stories of people who have given so much to the building of our country is so important,” he said, adding that the museum’s new Center for Family History will help Black families connect in new ways to their heritage.
“The Center for Family History has the potential for being a profoundly positive resource because the museum is feeding the story of history. Anything we can do to articulate a broader swath of that history is a powerful tool to help them understand.”
In a recorded video message, former First Lady Michelle Obama said she and her husband were thrilled to celebrate the opening of the museum. Her ancestors had daily roots at a Georgetown plantation.
Former President Barack Obama observed: “It’s a powerful museum – one that every American can learn something from. It’s an important part of our collective history.”
Obama’s former administrator of NASA, South Carolina native Charles F. Bolden Jr., also appeared on video screens at both locations: “Black history is American history and we need to have a place that people from around the world can come to understand our history.
“Where everything started”
The International African American Museum | Photo by Greg Noire.
Joy Bivens, who worked in 2018 to 2020 in Charleston to help bring the museum to reality, traveled to Charleston for the opening.
“I’m just excited it came to fruition,” said Bivens, now director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. “I recognize it as a center of the Black American experience. I think the museum put that culture in the limelight – in the public consciousness where it needs to be because this is where everything started.”
At the public “Community Watch” at Marion Square, Moncks Corner native and national radio star Charlamagne Tha God emceed a celebration that included performances by local musicians and artists such as Grammy Award-winning band Ranky Tanky, former Charleston poet laureate Marcus Amaker, DJ SCrib, Jesse Nager and more. Singers Bebe Winans and Candice Glover also performed during the dedication.
Laird Nelson, a Charleston resident since 2005, said he already has tickets for the second day that the museum is open and is planning to go again with family in July. The museum, he said, is “like a movie. You see it once, but you have to go again to get all the details.”
One woman, who wouldn’t give her name, said she was thrilled with the museum. “I’m very happy with the museum being built here. It took a while with the delay, but I’m happy it’s finally here. I’ll be going there very soon.”
A former school teacher who also wouldn’t give her name, attended the public ceremony but wasn’t as positive.
“I think it’s great that they spent all that money on that museum, but at the same time, we need money for the Black people. They are trying to disenfranchise us. They are trying to run us out of our community. They want me to be proud today. But I am not proud today. One day is not going to put a halo over me.”
The museum is open every Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. excluding Christmas and Thanksgiving. Admission price is $19.95 for adults, and $9.95 for youth, seniors and the military. Children under six are admitted free.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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