 |
Barbara Earl Thomas stands before the Northwest African-American Museum’s gallery, “Journeys,” which traces the routes by which Blacks were taken to North America and
migrated to the Pacific Northwest.
Photo by Mark Sullo |
It’s been 23 years since three activists
broke into Seattle’s old Colman School
to demand it be turned into a museum
of Black heritage. But in some ways, as
the Northwest African American Museum
finally prepares to open its doors on March
8, the mood is nearly as desperate.
Outside the renovated 1909 building,
a young woman and her friends are
unloading boxes of belongings for one
of 36 new low-income units that she’s
moving into upstairs. Inside, the scene
is much the same, and museum curator
Barbara Earl Thomas is a bit wide-eyed:
With just a week to the opening, cases
of unpacked exhibit items line the walls,
suppliers and technicians come and go,
and staff members load in sculpture by
James Washington Jr. and photographs
of Jacob Lawrence — one of America’s
pre-eminent Black artists of the 20th
Century.
The Harlem Renaissance painter died in
Seattle in 2000 after a long career teaching
at the University of Washington. The chair in
which he painted — a modest high-back of
plaid wool, adorned with two wash cloths
to keep paint off the arms — stands in a
nearly empty gallery that will showcase his
work and that of Washington, a self-taught
artist associated with the Northwest School
of the 1940s.
The paintings and sculpture are going
into a main gallery that will have rotating exhibits.
An adjacent hall displays a permanent
collection on who’s who and where it’s at in
northwestern Black history, from a wagon
wheel display for pioneer George Washington
Bush, who settled near Olympia in 1846,
to an interactive storefront representing
Seattle’s Jackson Street jazz clubs — one of
which was the site of 17-year-old Ray Charles’
first gig in 1948.
But the museum isn’t an archive of
big names— far from it. While the artifacts
of the famous or historic are here
— Lawrence’s chair, a hat and scarf of Jimi
Hendrix’s, a trumpet of Seattle jazz great
Floyd Standifer’s — the museum’s focus,
Thomas says, is on ordinary people and
the fabric of relationships by which they
prospered.
In the permanent exhibit, entitled “African
American Journeys,” the handsome face in
a photograph labeled simply “unidentified
porter circa 1951” is a case in point. Part of
the exhibit explains that many Blacks came
to Seattle and Portland during World War II
to get jobs in plane factories or shipyards, but
families moved around the Northwest quite
a bit, says museum director Carver Gayton,
because most were connected to the railroads
that had brought them from the South and
Midwest.
“The train was not only a means of
transportation but employment,” Gayton
says. “There aren’t too many families here
who didn’t have someone who worked
for the railroads” — including his maternal
grandfather, who worked as a waiter.
Museum visitors can trace these travels
in a general way or very specifically: A
globe in the “Journeys” collection displays
the trade routes by which slaves were
brought into the U.S. from the Congo,
Guinea, or many other points in Africa.
There’s also a state-of-the-art genealogy
center with computers that visitors can
use to research their family tree — in part
using software donated by the Mormons,
who “have the most extensive genealogical
research base of any organization in
the world,” Gayton says.
Back in the “Journeys” gallery, he’s
stopped for an introduction to a contractor
who’ll be supplying the museum with
its paper towels and toilet paper — a great
relief to Gayton, who says he didn’t know
who was going to do that. Down the hall,
within earshot of a video in which people
are singing “We Shall Overcome,” the
museum’s designer, Donald King, points
out to Gayton that lights shining through
the “Journeys” sign make it difficult to see
where the sign’s arrow is pointing.
“I’m feeling really frantic, but everything
is here now,” Thomas says of the scene.
“This is the point where everything comes
together. It’s the point of chaos — but that’s
what the creative process is about. |
