Prometheus 6   

Politics on Display in the Fight for a Black Museum
Exhibit A
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
July 9 - 15, 2003

For those who dream of a National African American Museum, something always comes along to jolt them awake. In the early 1990s, everyone from then Democratic representative Gus Savage of Illinois to Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina played the role of No-Doz and squelched the idea. After the 1994 GOP junta in Congress, all arts funding became suspect. Museum advocates believed that as long as Republicans ran Congress, a black museum would be a nonstarter. They may well have been right�but for the wrong reasons.

On its face the black museum movement is moving at full steam, Republican majority be damned. In May, Democratic senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and Republican senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, of Kansas and Pennsylvania respectively, introduced a bill authorizing the creation of a black museum�to be part of the Smithsonian in Washington�and providing $17 million in funding.

But details of the bill have become a sore point for the nearly two-year-old presidential commission charged with creating a blueprint for the museum.