20 years in the making, SC’s monumental African American museum to break ground
A monument to history that is generations in the making, the International African American Museum in Charleston is one step closer to reality as it celebrates a major milestone, a ceremonial groundbreaking, this week.
And at the forefront of Elijah Heyward III’s mind are his grandparents — what it would mean to them to see this vision, one they might never have imagined, take shape.
“My greatest influences were my grandparents,” said Heyward, a Beaufort native and chief operating officer of the museum. Three have passed away; he treasures his surviving grandmother.
“I can imagine what this project would mean to all four of them,” he said, “…who saw segregation, who were alive to know people who were formerly enslaved, who endured economic hardship … who really had hopes for me and my generation that they could never really fathom or see come to fruition.”
What’s coming to fruition is a $92 million museum, genealogical center and memorial garden to explore and honor the history of African Americans on the very site where many can trace their family lineage. The International African American Museum is to be a testament to history, to endurance and achievement, to culture and to hope.
“I’m excited to be able to welcome my grandmother to this museum and show her around and be able to witness the experience to her eyes,” Heyward said. “This institution and the hard work that we’re putting into making it a reality is meant to be a testament to them and their generation.”
The International African American Museum started with a vision by former Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, who was inspired by the 1998 book “Slaves in the Family” by Edward Ball, a descendant of slaveholders.
At the height of the Atlantic slave trade, between 1783 and 1808, an estimated 100,000 enslaved Africans were brought through Charleston, according to historians.
“I was struck with how little of this history I knew and how little of this history most people do (know). And it was our duty to present it,” said Riley, who first publicly presented the museum plans during his inaugural address in 2000. “I think it has created a structural defect in our country that we don’t know this history. … We haven’t embraced the history.”
In truth, the museum’s roots reach much, much further back than Riley’s vision — back to the 1780s at Charleston’s Gadsden’s Wharf, through which nearly half of all enslaved Africans who were brought to North America were funneled, historians estimate..
The site in Charleston has been considered “ground zero” for the institution of chattel slavery in the United States, according to scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Now, the very site will be a testament to those stories, as the museum takes shape at Gadsden’s Wharf along the Cooper River. This museum will be a physical taking-back of African American history, said Bernard Powers, a College of Charleston history professor and the chief executive officer of the museum.
It is “a reclamation that is triumphal, a reclamation that is hopeful,” he said, “a reclamation that is forward-looking. And all of those things are in stark contrast to the situation that makes this place so very special, as the place where so many Africans in dejection and in forced submission entered the country.”
After nearly two decades of planning (and “hoping,” according to museum board chairman Wilbur Johnson), a tangible affirmation will rise from the earth after the official groundbreaking on Friday.
Over the next two years, the site will transform. When it is complete in 2021, the International African American Museum will be more than just a museum; although “just” a museum seems a vast understatement.
It will tell “a story of years, of centuries,” said Johnson, a Charleston attorney who grew up in Columbia.
“We’re celebrating their lives, their culture, with the understanding that it didn’t just stop there,” said Melissa Lindler, a member of the museum’s board for a decade. She is also the director of Columbia’s Office of Business Opportunities and a former staffer for U.S. Congressman Jim Clyburn, of Columbia, the original museum board chairman. “All of us have been impacted by that voyage. …Those enslaved Africans helped us build this country that we have today.”
Lindler said she hopes future museum visitors will leave with a deepened curiosity about who they are and where they came from, a transformation she experienced while serving on the board.
“When you know who you are, you have a better idea of where you’re going,” she said.
The museum will include exhibits tracing African American history from Africa to North America, from Gadsden’s Wharf to plantations, from the earliest days of slavery to the modern day. Exhibits will highlight notable African Americans and their contributions to South Carolina and American history, and they’ll explore the details of African American life and culture, including that of the Gullah and Geechee people. And because it is purposefully international in scope, the museum will also feature sections about the millions of descendants of slaves in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Museum curators also plan to have changing exhibits about issues that are pertinent to the contemporary African American experience, according to Powers.
“People will leave more readily engaged in conversation about race and will, so many times, say to themselves or to their friends or their family, ‘You know, I never knew that. I had no idea about that,’” Riley said. “It’s like it’s a discovery, because we didn’t teach the history. I think that’s what they’ll talk about.”
The museum also will be a center for individual storytelling through genealogy and family research — accessible and profound in its ability to connect individuals to their own history and to link each of those “intersecting” histories to one another, Powers said.
The museum’s unique Center for Family History will include a collection of historical records and documents visitors can use to find ancestors. There also will be an audio recording space to preserve oral histories.
Further, the museum will be a memorial and place of reverence, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean and, if human eyes were capable of it, the African continent.
“This is not just a look back, but a look forward, helping us recognize that we are the constant architects of the world that we live in,” said Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, who is on the museum’s board of directors.
It has taken nearly two decades and $100 million to arrive at Friday’s groundbreaking. Support has come from more than 2,000 donors, according to Heyward, the chief operating officer. Individuals, organizations and governments from across South Carolina, the United States and the world have pitched in.
Renowned architectural firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the group behind the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is leading the design of the museum. Walter Hood, a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, will create artistic memorials and landscapes in the first-floor breezeway of the museum.
It will be a major statement for Charleston, tempering the city’s identity as a charming Southern tourism hotspot to highlight its complicated, dense history.
Board members said they also hope the museum will inform the burgeoning national conversations about reparations, racial equity and justice.
“As much as we can learn about each other and about our shared path, the better off we’ll be to share the future,” Clyburn said.
Groundbreaking attendees will gather on the museum grounds at 10 a.m. Friday after a Thursday evening interfaith worship service at Mother Emanuel AME Church, a longstanding African American institution.
They will physically turn over that patch of earth formerly marked by shame, and they will begin the process of redeeming it.
“This is only the beginning,” Johnson said. “The groundbreaking should not be seen as an endpoint or that the job has been done, but … this is really just the beginning of an institution and an effort that we intend to have ongoing and lasting effects on not only African Americans, but the entire population, certainly of this state and across the nation.”
The groundbreaking ceremony will be at 10 a.m. Friday, Oct. 25, at 10 Wharfside St., Charleston. Tickets to the event are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis at www.IAAMuseum.org. Thursday’s interfaith worship service will be held at 6:30 p.m. at Mother Emanuel AME Church, 110 Calhoun St., Charleston. The service is open to the public. No tickets are needed for the service.
This story was originally published October 24, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
