More history for the day

Rico says his friend Esha has long worked to get a slavery museum opened, but got trumped by the big guys, as this article by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times shows:

About six hundred people, including the country’s first black President, gathered on the National Mall recently for a moment nearly a century in the making: the groundbreaking for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It is real. It is real,” Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia and a hero of the civil rights movement, said of this latest Smithsonian museum, which is being built next to the Washington Monument and near the site of former slave pens.
A national African-American museum was first proposed by black Civil War veterans nearly a hundred years ago, and Lewis began sponsoring bills to make that dream a reality in 1987, soon after he was elected to Congress. President George W. Bush signed the legislation into law in 2003, after it won support from conservative Republicans like Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, then a senator, who was among those attending on Wednesday.
All the speakers, including President Obama and Lonnie G. Bunch III, the museum’s director, referred to the nation’s ugly history of slavery and racism, the triumphant American spirit and the notion that the museum was not only about black history, but also American history.
“Generations will remember the sometimes difficult, often inspirational, but always central role African-Americans have played in the life of our country,” President Obama said. He added that he wanted his daughters, Sasha and Malia, to see the Tuskegee airmen and other historical figures like Harriet Tubman not as larger-than-life individuals but as examples of “how ordinary Americans can do extraordinary things.”
The actress Phylicia Rashad led the ceremony, which also featured poetry and music by Denyce Graves, Thomas Hampson, and the Heritage Signature Chorale. The Reverend Calvin O. Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City offered remarks in verse, including lines from various poems, like Langston Hughes’ I, Too, Sing America:

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

The museum, scheduled to open on its five-acre site in 2015, has acquired twenty thousand artifacts so far, and is expected to cost $500 million to build, half of which is to be paid by Congress. The three-tiered copper structure is designed with what David Adjaye, the museum architect, calls a “porch”, an enduring feature of black life at home.
G. Wayne Clough, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, emphasized outreach efforts, saying, “If you can’t come to us, we’ll come to you,” referring to an increasing digital presence, traveling exhibitions and partnerships with affiliate museums.
The groundbreaking comes as details of the travel expenditures of Clough and his wife have kicked off a mini-storm in Washington. His predecessor, Lawrence M. Small, stepped down after reports of his lavish travel at taxpayers’ expense. Nearly all of Clough’s trips since he arrived in 2008 have been paid for by privately donated money, but the details of his 59 trips, revealed by junketsleuth.com, have spurred Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, to ask for Clough’s travel documents.
Speaking before the ceremony, Clough dismissed comparisons to Small, and noted that he earns half of his predecessor’s salary and accepts no housing allowance. “Before I travel ten miles, I have to get two people to approve it,” he said. Budget cuts have compelled him to do more aggressive fund-raising, he said, and traveling is essential to achieving that goal.
Returning to the subject of the new building, Clough said that his growing up in the segregated South had made the museum, the nineteenth that the Smithsonian oversees, particularly meaningful to him.
Richard D. Parsons, a co-chairman of the museum’s advisory council who shared the dais with Clough, noted the truism “the winners write history”. In this case, he added, “We won.”