Exhibition provokes, inspires

Slave shackles from the Middle Passage voyage to America were bad, but we know about them.

A surprise indignity seemed to resonate with visitors yesterday when the "America I AM" mobile exhibition stopped in Richmond.

A weather-beaten wooden trough, displayed in front of a photo of a slave cabin, looked like something that would have been used for farm animals. Instead, it was used for enslaved children to eat corn mush.

"It brought tears to my eyes," said Ryann Spencer, who was volunteering with the American Civil War Center yesterday while the "supertruck" was parked at Wal-Mart on Sheila Lane.

"Those who ate fastest got the most" was the way escaped slave and abolitionist author Frederick Douglass described the feeding system in exhibit text.

To Alfred Jones Jr., 51, of Richmond, the outcome seemed even worse. "If you didn't eat fast enough, you didn't eat," he said. "To see what we will put each other through, this is amazing." Jones said it made him angry.

To Ron Keith, 38, director of training for property management for General Services Corp., the same trough seemed inspirational.

"It should inspire, really, any race, any man or woman, who looks at it," Keith said. "Wow, someone who ate out of a trough can aspire to do great things.

"It's an excuse eliminator for me. If these people can achieve, we all can achieve."

Exhibits in the supertruck preview a 12,000to 15,000-square-foot exhibition that will open in February at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. By 2012, it will travel to museums in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Dallas and elsewhere. Tomorrow, it will be in Hampton.

Videotapes of visitors' thoughts during the mobile tour, including those from Richmond, will be part of the exhibition experience.

Artifacts here included a red boxing glove autographed by Muhammad Ali, and a Life magazine cover showing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holding a wreath for the Rev. James Reeb, who was killed during the 1965 voting-rights protests in Selma, Ala.

On the final panel, the theme turned from tragedy to triumph, from Jim Crow laws to an African-American candidate for president, from a tradition of storytellers to a Nobel Prize for an African-American author.

Mary Lauderdale, museum coordinator at the Black History Museum and a volunteer yesterday, said she thought of her grandmother, an orphaned sharecropper who lived to be 103.

"From her came about 40 people. In my family, there are doctors, there are lawyers, there are engineers, there are people that work on the railroad. It's about diversity, it's about love, it's about just contributing in your way. . . .

"We need to start embracing history more. . . . It's not about bringing baggage with you. It's about understanding so you don't repeat."
Contact Katherine Calos at (804) 649-6433 or .