Lewis Fraction never imagined that his death would help inspire work toward a museum on the Mall.
Brother Fraction and I were mentors in a church youth program when he died 20 years ago, just shy of his 60th birthday, leaving behind a wife and four grown children. While at his home to comfort his family and remember his life, I was struck by the stories told by the elders gathered there.
Stories about the myriad joys of youth--the courtship rituals, old dance steps, swooning over Sam Cooke. Stories about all-black, one-room, ramshackle schoolhouses and the nurturing but stern teachers who presided over them. Some described never seeing a whole piece of chalk or a new textbook, just broken bits and beaten-up books handed down from white schools. There were stories about countless indignities, major and minor, and the psychological wounds they inflicted.
Magnificent stories. Awful stories. Profound stories.
As we drove home that evening, I asked my wife, "Why don't we have a museum to tell all of those stories?"
This question came with a lot of background. I had spent six years on the front lines of the criminal-justice system as a public defender and seen so much tragedy. When I started on the job, the nation was still in the middle of the crack epidemic and the District of Columbia was known as the Murder Capital of the Nation. One day I was looking for a witness in the middle of the afternoon when a dilapidated station wagon drove slowly down the street with four or five guys inside. The front passenger was holding an AK-47 rifle pointed upward and at the ready. Fortunately, the car drove past without incident.
Back then, folks called those "war wagons." I was growing weary of the war.
It was disillusioning and depressing. So on that one evening in 1996, remembering a loved one, I was inspired to become part of something positive. I wanted to help build a museum, so that those stories--the painful and the wonderful--would finally have a home. And after witnessing so much racial division throughout my life, those stories could serve another important purpose: unity. Even though relating this past would cause some pain, and some shame, an honest examination of this history could help us learn from the past and think about how we can come closer together as a nation.
Many others had this same inspiration. The first were in 1916, when a group of African American leaders came together to create a National Memorial Building dedicated "as a tribute to the Negro's contribution to the achievements of America."
Now, 100 years later, the Smithsonian Institution is opening the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A journey that began against the backdrop of D.W. Griffith's racist movie, The Birth of a Nation, being screened at the White House, will end, four generations later, with an opening ceremony presided over by an African American president and witnessed by luminaries such as Oprah Winfrey and Cicely Tyson, who promote positive images of African Americans on film.
I wish Brother Fraction were here to see it.
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Robert L. Wilkins, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, served on the presidential commission created by Congress to plan the National Museum of African American History and Culture. His book on the creation of the museum, Long Road to Hard Truth, was released this month.
Editorial on 09/21/2016