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There are the things that happen that people seek to know, and other things they seek to forget. And then, sometimes, for some of us, there are events we feel deep in our bones.
Sunday night, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., I saw the way these dynamics are at play in the lives of people unwittingly thrust into history. Among the visitors were Lora King, daughter of Rodney King—accompanied by her children as well as her mother, Dennetta Lyles King, an ex-wife of Rodney King—and Bridgett Floyd, sister of George Floyd, and her children. None had visited the museum before, nor had the women previously spent considerable time together.
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The women and the museum had been brought together by the Human Gathering, a group that one of its founders, Joshua Jordison, bills as an exclusive social organization that produces vacations, experiences—like museum tours—and social-improvement projects for its members. Some members are currently working to create an investment fund that they say will fund businesses in underserved communities as well as a nonprofit social justice organization guided by King, Floyd, and others who find themselves similarly situated to “leverage” the publicity they cannot avoid, one of the fund developers, Brian Forman, tells me. Several of the people involved in the project are also present. Leading the tour are museum director Kevin Young and Aaron Bryant, a curator with his own stories about the work of preserving history.
Read more: 12 Questions for Kevin Young, Poet and the New Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Most museums, Bryant tells me the next day, were built by robber barons, new money looking for a path to social standing or just a place to store the treasures from their travels. Other museums exist to memorialize the lifestyles and images of the rich and the royal. But the NMAAHC, which opened…
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Source : time
