African American Museum Tells "Richer and Fuller" Story of America, Says Obama.

President Obama officially opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture Saturday, delivering a moving address on the importance of the newest Smithsonian venue and its role in providing “context for the debates of our times.” 

“This national museum helps to tell a richer and fuller story of who we are,” the president said on the National Mall, where the museum was built just blocks away from the White House. Through it, “we better understand ourselves and each other. It binds us together. It reaffirms that all of us are America. That African-American history is not somehow separate from our American story … it is central to the American story.”  

“It is a glorious story,” he said, following speeches by those pivotal to the museum’s opening, including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, and former President George W. Bush. “The one that’s told here -- it is complicated and it is messy and it is full of contradictions. As all stories are.” 

With exhibits on slavery, lynching, and the victims of Jim Crow, the president noted that the museum showcased the uglier parts of America’s historical treatment of its black citizens alongside African-American successes.

“Our glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs,” Mr. Obama said, “but how we have wrested triumph from tragedy and how we have been able to remake ourselves again, and again, and again in accordance with our highest ideas.”

“Yes, a clear-eyed view of history can make us uncomfortable,” he said, but he expressed hope that it would “shake us out of our familiar narratives.”

The history told by the museum, he said, “is a story that needs to to be told now more than ever.”

In his nearly half-hour-long address, the president alluded to the recent spate of violence against black Americans -- and the subsequent demonstrations those incidents have sparked. 

“This museum provides context for the debates of our times. It illuminates them and gives us some sense to how they evolved,” he said. “Perhaps they can help a white visitor understand the pain and anger of demonstrators like those in Ferguson and Charlotte.”  

For black visitors, the president said it could also help them appreciate “the sincerity of law enforcement officials… who in fits and starts are struggling to understand and are trying to do the right thing.” 

“It reminds us that routine discrimination and Jim Crow aren’t ancient history,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s just a blink in the eye of history. It was just yesterday. And so we should not be surprised that not all the healing is done. We shouldn’t despair that it isn’t all solved.”  

“Protest and love of country don’t merely coexist, but they inform each other,” he added.


Courtesy CBS.



Gen. Colin Powell on Racism.

It’s downright shameful that a whole President Obama is rudely confronted with so much stereotypes and disrespects on daily basis and, especially, by those who are not as well-educated and professionally grounded as he is.

 

What then should poor folks like me expect from similar ignorant people all around us? Most often when I look at the idiots who try stereotyping and disrespecting me, I realize that they are barely educated. Each time this happens, all I see is a fool who cannot see beyond his/her nose. And this only drives me crazy.

The Door of No Return---A Solemn place for 3 U.S. Presidents.

Reporter reflects on Obama’s emotional visit — and her own — to African slave site

In a emotional visit to Senegal’s Goree Island, President Obama stood at the threshold of the “Door of No Return,” the place that’s come to symbolize the journey of millions of African slaves, who were bound, shackled and sent to America and other foreign lands.

American Urban Radio’s April Ryan, herself a descendant of slaves, has now visited Goree Island with three U.S. presidents, including Obama. She told Politics Confidential she gets goose bumps talking about the significance of the first African-American president’s visit to the “Door of No Return” at the historic slave house.

“Now you have an African-American president, a true African-American president, a son of a man born in Kenya, who does not necessarily have a direct link to slavery, and he will walk through that door,” Ryan told Politics Confidential aboard a ferry bound for Goree Island.

“He's come home, he's come home,” Ryan said. “And when I say he's come home, he, like myself, is a child of the motherland.”

Ryan reflected on what life must have been like for the slaves, describing the cramped conditions slaves were held in on Goree Island.

“When you walk through that slave house, you see the small rooms; you wonder how someone could do that to another human being, and the number of people crammed into those rooms,” Ryan said. “And to imagine, this was the last step that took them at least six months across the sea to where they became slaves.”

As a descendant of slaves, Ryan said she couldn’t help but feel emotional as the ferry approached the shores of Goree Island.

“I'm five generations removed from the last known slave in my family, and he was sold on the auction block in Fayetteville, North Carolina,” Ryan said. “So, it is poignant. I mean as a reporter, we are reporters, but sometimes the human experience comes in.”

For more of the interview with Ryan, including her recollections of her previous trips to the island while covering President Clinton and President George W. Bush, check out this episode of Politics Confidential.

ABC's Stephanie Smith, Mary Bruce, Michael Conte, Ginny Vicario, and John Glennon contributed to this episode. (June 28, 2013).