With a president who broke racial barriers watching, the Smithsonian on Wednesday broke ground on its National Museum of African American History and Culture — its 13th museum along or near the National Mall and one that will again reset the District’s landscape.
“The time will come when few people remember drinking from a colored water fountain or boarding a segregated bus,” President Obama said. “That’s why what we build here won’t just be an achievement for our time, it will be a monument for all time.”
| Long time coming |
| Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who rose to Congress after spending years as a Southern civil rights leader, said Wednesday’s groundbreaking was the latest step in a long quest to secure a museum. |
| “What we witnessed today will go down in history,” Lewis said. “It is the substance of things hoped for and a validation of our dreams. … This is an idea whose time has come.” |
The museum, slated to open in 2015, will sit on a five-acre parcel of land nestled between the Washington Monument and the National Museum of American History. Constitution Avenue, Madison Drive and 14th and 15th streets will encircle the property.
“It was on this ground long ago that lives were once traded, where hundreds of thousands once marched for jobs and for freedom,” Obama said. “It was here that the pillars of democracy were built often by black hands.”
The new museum will once more reshape the two-mile span that attracts 25 million visitors annually, even though Congress has declared the Mall to be “a substantially completed work of civic art.”
The museum’s debut near a new memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. could help bring more visitors to the space some have called “America’s Front Yard,” a prominent Mall advocate said.
“The interesting model to look at is the Martin Luther King Memorial, which has certainly driven tourism to that part of the Mall and to the Mall in general,” said Caroline Cunningham, president of the Trust for the National Mall. “Having both that anchor monument and the museum together … will increase the number of visitors we get on an annual basis.”
But not everyone is happy about the additions, which in recent years have also included the World War II Memorial and a Smithsonian museum about American Indians, because of the green space they consume.
Don Hawkins, a former chairman of the Committee of 100 for the Federal City, said the location of the new museum was troubling. “Nobody really wanted to see that space taken up by a building,” he said.
He added that planners and lawmakers often try to change development rules.
“There never will be an end [to development], and there never will be an end to attempts to get it under control,” Hawkins said. “Congress is up there to break the rules.”
