I Visit the Museum of White Supremacy

Well worth the $18.60 admissison charge!

Last week, A Legend in His Own Minefield was privileged to get a sneak preview of the latest signal achievement of MAGA, the new $1.6 billion Museum of White Supremacy in Washington DC, and all I can is: wow!

In the spirit Secretary of Xenophobia Miller and President Trump would revive over a century and a half later, the slave ship Clotilda brought its last load of African slaves to America fully 50 years after the transatlantic slave trade had been banned. Woke abolitionists demanded that the ship be sunk, but what was this I saw before me if not an officers’ luncheon menu from August 4, 1858 offering collard greens and smothered chicken.

On June 12, 1963, the white supremacist and Klansman Byron de la Beckwish shot dead Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, in front of Evers’ home in Jackson with a Remington 700 sniper rifle. The museum doesn’t claim definitively that the displayed casing is from the bullet that actually killed Evers, but one can hope!

I was overcome by nostalgia as I examined the museum’s collection of mid-20th century residential racial covenants that prohibited selling or even renting to black folk, as President Trump’s proud papa was said to be a great enthusiast of these covenants, which were supported by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and without which whole neighborhoods in great American cities like Chicago and Detroit might have been besieged by the uncouth descendants of kidnapped Africans.

I felt honored to be allowed to hold in my hand a spark plug from the 1961 Ford F100 pickup truck in which Klansman Jerry Joe Jenkins Jr. transported Freedom Summer meddlers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and their Negro bestie James Chaney to the remote spot outside Philadelphia Mississippi in which they tortured and executed the despicable threesome on June 21, 1964.

In the summer of 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Louis Till foolishly whistled at or spoke to a white woman who owned a small grocery store. Well, maybe Chicago tolerated that flavor of uppity, but Money, Mississippi, most assuredly did not. Emmett was kidnapped, brutally beaten, mutilated, shot in the head, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, later immortalized in Bobby Gentry’s 1967 hit “The Ballad of Billy Jo”. Photos of young Till’s mutilated face were published all over the world, and inspired a lot of woke outrage, but it turns out that the really graphic ones have been suppressed until now. They are on display in the Emmett Till Room of the museum, to enter which one must sign a waiver.

All I can, again, is: wow! It’s a good thing the room’s periphery is lined with pails into which the faint-hearted can vomit!

I will admit to being lukewarm on the exhibit of homemade hemp or cotton ropes of the sort used to lynch some 3800 black Southerners between 1877 and 1950. I did, especially after just having left the Emmett Till Room, find a bit…much the account of the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner in Lowndes County, Georgia. Though pregnant, Mary had ill-advisedly protested the recent lynching of her husband, and was tortured, hanged, and burned alive.

That said, how not to love the very attractive and informative Slave Catchers Gallery, in which is celebrated the heroism of the likes of Edward Gorsuch. Is Mr. Gorsuch — the quadruple-great grandfather of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch? Said Maryland slaveholder’ death in the infamous Christiana Riot of 1851 turned into a national flashpoint in the struggle over the Fugitive Slave Act, which I understand the Trump administration is hoping to reinstate. Passing through the museum’s gift shop at the end of my visit, I was delighted to discover for sale decks of slave catcher playing cards, and bought three such decks to give as Xmas gifts.

Other highlights: the “Bull” Connor Audio-Visual Room, in which one may listen to recordings of President Trump wondering, “Where’s my African American?” and declaring himself the least racist person who ever lived, and a film of then-Santa Monica High School junior Stephen Miller demanding to know why students were expected to pick up their own trash after lunch when the school employed Latino janitors for just such humiliations.