As a resident of northern Virginia, I've had the opportunity to watch DC's latest museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC) take shape on the National Mall. Witnessing the long construction phase has been like seeing a thought form in the mind of the nation--a collective utterance that promises much, yet is still fraught with ambivalence.
Upon visiting the finished Museum, I can say that while the thought is still not settled, the promise is fulfilled. The African-American experience is represented over galleries that spiral up from the gloom of the lowest level, from displays on the onset of race-based chattel slavery in the 15th century, into the comparative light of 2017. The history is presented mostly as text, illustrated by carefully selected objects, like Nat Turner's personal Bible, Harriet Tubman's shawl, and an airplane flown by the Tuskegee airmen. The cumulative effect is dignified and powerful. If the greatness of a nation is like individual genius--able to entertain two incompatible ideas at the same time--then the NMAAHC (and its sister institution, the National Museum of the American Indian) provide essential counter-narratives to the white marble monuments that surround them.
And yet, it wasn't the Bible or the plane that stuck in my mind when I left. Instead, it was a simple placard that describes the human toll of the slave trade: out of every 100 people enslaved in Africa, 39 died on the march from the interior to the coast, 4 or 5 died in detention, and another 9 during the voyage to America. The exhibit leaves implicit what is broadly understood, that the genocide of African people began when native potentates with business ties to Europeans brought their captives to slave trading stations on the coasts. The point is arguably left too implicit: NMAAHC never comes out and says "Both European-descended whites AND African blacks were implicated in the crime of slavery." Yet based on the Museum’s own information, that is manifestly true.
Interestingly, the forced Long March was far more deadly than the other, more popularly known part of the journey, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. The fatality rate at sea was horrific, but still less than half as large, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total loss of life, as on land. So why are we all taught about the journey by slave ship, but not about the March? Why is the European slave ship, stuffed with its human "cargo", emblematic of the horror of the slavery, but not the more deadly trip that preceded it?
Part of this can probably be blamed on the surviving evidence. Period posters advertising the human contents of slave ships are relatively easy to find. Woodcuts of slaves chained in ships' holds are in every US history textbook ever published. Slave ships physically presented themselves at American ports, and some famous Americans, such as John Paul Jones, actually worked on them. Records of captive deaths during the passage were not necessarily complete, but they exist. According to the best known estimates, some 10-15% of African captives died at sea.
By contrast, contemporary depictions of the Long March are rarer. It's probably just as well, as the spectacle of men, women and children chained over journeys of hundreds of miles, whipped and starved and raped and collapsed from exhaustion, their limbs swollen and festering in their bonds, could not have been pretty. Nor is the written evidence much better. In 1839, British historian Thomas Fowell Buxton reported on a particular slave caravan: “Many of the unhappy victims, who could be no longer urged, by the whips of their drivers, to further exertions of their drivers, had their ears cut off while yet alive, and were then left to await the agonies of the last moment in the Desert.” (The severed ears were used for record-keeping.) Buxton goes on “the number of those who die, merely on the journey from the interior to the coast, [is] five-twelfths of the whole” (more than 40%; emphasis in original).
It's hard not to suspect another reason to forget the March. Just as every good story needs a hero, every good historical narrative needs a villain. And the villains of the Middle Passage are easy to point to: they were the men who owned the ships, the men who sailed them, the men who kept the death tallies, and the men who provided the market for their services. In a word, they were racist, mercantile whites.
The Long March was more deadly than the Middle Passage, but the faces of its perpetrators offer no such clarity. In the web of relations that made the slave trade possible, it was overwhelmingly native Africans who fulfilled the demand. Without their help, rounding up millions of captives for export would have been far less practical--and far less profitable. Depicting it would present a more morally ambiguous picture, with powerful black chieftains and war profiteers among those who sold their neighbors literally down the river.
The Museum makes a point to explain how servitude became racialized in colonial America, changing from a temporary legal condition affecting blacks and whites to a hereditary status applied to blacks alone. But it leaves unspoken how the moral onus of slavery has come to be racialized too—applied only to the "demand" side of the trade. In fact, the trade and its crimes were not just consequences of white racism, but critically dependent on African partners. This isn’t to minimize or dismiss the role of Europeans and white Americans. It is merely to acknowledge the truth: slavery was a global institution that was bigger than racism.
On its website, the NMAAC describes the “four pillars” on which it stands. Number 2 is “[helping] all Americans see how their stories, their histories, and their cultures are shaped and informed by global influences.” Insofar as the Museum underemphasizes the Long March and all it implies for slavery as an institution, it is not only failing to remember its many victims. It is also failing place to US slavery in its proper context among the globe’s other “slaveries”.
Places like NMAAHC are powerful shapers of public perception. When the casual visitor reads something at a museum--especially one as iconic as the Smithsonian--it becomes tantamount to God's own truth, chiseled in tablets of stone. Naturally, then, how the history is packaged becomes as much a political product as a scholarly one. Forthrightly acknowledging the role of Africans in perpetuating the slave trade might, for instance, complicate the argument for reparations for the descendants of slaves, as it would pose the question: “So what reparations do native Africans owe?”
I like to think of the NMAAHC as an ongoing project--as a still-incomplete thought in the mind of the nation. Which of its roles in our “national conversation on race” should come first? To inform? To celebrate? To atone? To challenge? The newest museum on the Mall will have a long time to sort out these priorities. Let us all hope it finds the best balance.
© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro
