The Last Page

Collective memory goes up for grabs wherever people suffer from dispossession and feel the call of pride. Memories are not born but made, remade, not natural but “constructed,” and like the memorials constructed to overcome memory, they are—and of necessity must be—contested.

Where, I’ve wondered for some time, is the national museum on slavery? The story of slavery and its sequels is not just a story for blacks, just as the Holocaust is not just a story for Jews. Not long ago, I asked Jürgen Habermas his view of the dispute over a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. The original design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra envisioned a vast field of spiky stones, a field of thorns. After a demurral from Gerhard Schröder’s newly elected social democratic government, along with leaders of Germany’s Jews, the field was scaled back and a library of Holocaust archives added. Habermas, a center of moral clarity in Germany for some thirty-five years now, told me that he preferred the original, more drastic design. “It’s not for the Jews,” he said emphatically. “It’s meant to be a thorn in the flesh of the Germans.”

A thorn in the flesh of the Germans. Habermas’s ripping phrase came back to mind during another recent conversation, this one about the lack of a national museum of the African-American experience. For all the regearing of textbooks in recent years, for all the troubled minds on the question of “whiteness,” America strangely lacks a serious, centrally placed museum on slavery, and more generally on the multiple experiences of African Americans. Even Rochester, New York, for many years the dwelling place of Frederick Douglass, and later his burial place, lacks a museum devoted to this exemplary man.

That there is not yet room on the Washington Mall for a thoughtful exploration of the core national trauma is a sign of evasion—white evasion, mainly. No Whitney Museum ejaculations of white guilt, draped as art, can remedy the lack. But whites aren’t the only obstacles. Some African Americans have been heard to say that life is hard enough without a vivid display of the brutalities that marked most of the history of the Africans dragged to this continent and the history that befell them here. In 1995, employees of the Library of Congress protested a photographic show, “Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation,” that documented the buildings where slaves led their lives around the plantation manors, juxtaposing photos to the texts of slave narratives. Employees protested that the show made them feel bad, whereupon squeamish Library administrators took it down. The president of an African-American Cultural Association told a reporter, “An exhibit is supposed to celebrate something positive.” The Library also plucked four antilynching cartoons out of an exhibit of NAACP graphics, saying the images were “difficult.” Since t...