Interesting NYT story on efforts to launch an American Museum of Slavery in Richmond, one of which is the vision of former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder and is on its second go-round after failing in Fredricksburg.
Anyone who’s followed Gboro politics knows there has been considerable controversy surrounding our own International Civil Rights Center and Museum housed in the former Woolworth’s where the Greensboro Four staged their historic sit-in.
I could give a brief history of the civil rights museum’s problems, or I could just highlight Wilder’s problems, because –you guessed it—many are the same:
A mix of bafflement and bad feelings still resides in Fredericksburg.
“The first inkling I had that something wasn’t right was when Wilder came and met with the Fredericksburg City Council in a closed session,” in 2001, said the city’s mayor at the time, Bill Beck. “He was obviously sincere about the issue and the subject matter. But it struck me that for a guy who’d been talking about a museum at that point for a number of years he really hadn’t given much thought to how a museum operates and what a museum is.”
Mr. Wilder first told the council his museum would cover a period of history that ended with the Civil War, Mr. Beck said. Then, a few minutes later, he suggested that the museum should take the story through the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
Mr. Beck said that he was frustrated by the lack of transparency and professionalism surrounding the project. He said the council, for example, learned the museum might be coming to Fredericksburg only when Mr. Wilder broke the news at a gathering of slave descendants at Montpelier, the estate of James Madison.
“He never did any of the things you would do in terms of starting a museum,” he said.
Mr. Beck, an antiques dealer, said he was not impressed by items from the collection displayed at a local university in 2004 and didn’t think the museum had hired enough professionals to staff such an ambitious venture. “He never did anything practical,” he said. “It was all show.”
Further complicating matters for Gov. Wilder is the City of Richmond’s $18 million bird in the hand—via taxpayers, of course. As for Gboro’s civil rights museum, I’m still waiting for the awesome exhibit that’s going to get me over there a second time.
