The underground history galleries of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture are separated by two transitional years: 1877, the year Reconstruction ended, and 1968, a year that was, as the museum's website notes, "a turning point in the African-American freedom movement." This was the year that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and it was the year that the first elected African-American mayors of major cities in the United States took office: Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana.
It's also the starting point for the museum's exhibition, "A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond," for which Michelle Joan Wilkinson serves as a curator, along with co-curator William Pretzer. It's through the lenses of architecture and design that she has chosen to base much of her work. This is seen most vividly in the section of the exhibit titled "Shifting Landscapes: Cities and Suburbs."
In that showcase, visitors can view a replica of the old Chicago "Mr. Muse Bar," a speakeasy that Isaiah Muse ran out of his home when African Americans weren't welcomed in other upscale Chicago bars and entertainment venues. Visitors can also see a non-replica segment of brick wall and metal door from the Baxter Terrace housing projects of Newark, New Jersey, which no longer stands. The capsule attached to it includes the quote, "The city is the black man's land," the title of a text from James and Grace Lee Boggs, written in 1966. Nearby is the August 3rd, 1970, edition of Newsweek with the face of Newark's first African-American mayor Kenneth Gibson on the cover next to the headline: "The Black Mayors: How Are They Doing?"
[For more on this story by BRENTIN MOCK, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...tory-of-black-design]
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