The artifacts of American museums explain the disproportionate role of racism in the history of the nation
DEARBORN, Mich. – The United States museums display artifacts that represent and reflect historical events in the era of civil rights. Visitors to the Henry Ford near Detroit can see the bus that Rosa Parks was rolling when she refused to give up her seat for a white man in 1955, and an office where Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. provides for voting rights.
“What we are doing here is helping to explain our story, as a community, as a culture, as a society to those who may not have experienced it, who may not remember it or who may have a different memory of what we understand collectively,” said Amber Mitchell, curator of black history at the Henry Ford.
Public access to these articles on federal sites can be restricted or prohibited by Trump administration rules aimed at prohibiting what the president calls “divisive” ideology which recognizes the disproportionate role that racism has played in American history and culture.
Artefacts include:
– The Clark doll, a plastic dark skin toy doll used by Kenneth and Grank Clark psychologists in the 1940s while studying the impact of segregation on black children. The doll is on permanent exhibition on the national historical site Brown c. Brown c. Education in Topeka, Kansas.
– Shards of stained glass windows from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, are exhibited at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, white supremacist DC bombed the church in 1963, killing four black girls attending the Sunday school.
– parts of a car belonging to the activist of NAACP, Vernon Dahmer, are loaned in the long term to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi. The Ku Klux Klan bombed and shot Dahmer’s home in 1966. Dahmer, who had recruited blacks to vote, saved his family and they escaped in the car, but he died the day after smoke.
– The fountain pens used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the 1964 law on civil rights and the 1965 law on voting rights are exhibited at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
– Executive ordinances 9980 and 9981 which have de -regulated the American army and the federal government are stored in the national archives, but copies are exhibited at the Harry S. Truman presidential library in Independence, Missouri. Truman issued orders in 1948 following a blow that left the army. Isaac Woodard Blind. Woodard returned home in South Carolina in 1946 after serving during the Second World War when a white police chief fired him from a levry bus and beat him. Woodward still wore his uniform when he was attacked. A fully white jury acquitted the chief.
