An African American leader brings a provocative take to expanded Civil War museum, Gregory Schneider, Washington Post, April 15, 2018
Caption: Christy
Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum, which is headquartered
at the site of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond.
Christy Coleman spends a lot of time among artifacts of the Civil War,
and two that touch her deeply are a pair of tattered Confederate battle
flags. This seems odd for an African American woman, until she explains.
One banner has a single word stitched on it:
Home. The white material of the flag, it turns out, was cut from a
wedding dress. The other flag is a traditional Stars and Bars, like
you’d see on a T-shirt or shot glass. But this one was captured at the
Battle of the Crater in Petersburg by United States Colored Troops.
Both
relics hint at deeper human stories, and that’s where Coleman finds
meaning in her job as chief executive of the American Civil War Museum,
an institution created from the ruins of this city’s Confederate
ironworks.
As the nation wrestles with its
heritage of racial discrimination, and as the symbols of the Civil War
show fresh power to divide, no place has a deeper stake than Richmond — a
majority-black city where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson still
cast long shadows. And no one is more on the spot to figure it all out than Coleman.“To
have someone, a woman, who’s African American, at one of the most
important museums in the former capital of the Confederacy — you can’t
underestimate how important that is,” said Kevin Levin, a Civil War
historian. “She really stands out.”
Coleman is
using that position to look for a new way to tell the story of the Civil
War, a conflict so easy to render in stereotypes. With a major
expansion of the museum underway, her goal is to show the conflict from
multiple points of view — not just North and South, but through the eyes
of women, Native Americans, enslaved blacks, immigrants. If you can change perspectives, the thinking goes, issues begin to look different. Assumptions waver.
That
premise will be put to the test long before the expanded museum opens
later this year. Coleman is helping lead a commission appointed by
Richmond’s mayor to recommend what to do with five enormous statues of
Confederate leaders along the city’s grandest residential boulevard,
Monument Avenue.
Those
statues are as fundamental to Richmond’s identity as Thomas Jefferson’s
Capitol building. Coleman is conscious of the violence that has ripped
other communities, such as nearby Charlottesville, over the same issue.
But it’s not the first time she has confronted the nation’s most
troubling legacy in a controversial and public way.“America’s reckoning with her sin and her trauma,” Coleman said, “is really what we’ve got to get to.”
Coleman,
53, grew up in Williamsburg, in the workaday city behind Ye Olde
Colonial Facade. Her neighborhood and church were filled with the
tradespeople who groomed the gardens, sheared the sheep or ran the
printing press in the historic area. Most of
the costumed interpreters didn’t look like Coleman, despite the fact
that in Colonial times more than half the residents of Williamsburg were
of African descent.
But she was captivated by
them and won an audition for a reenactor role when she was only 17. The
other historic interpreters worried about her. “They were preserving
trades,” she said. “I was portraying an enslaved person.”
She
saw something horrible overcome visitors who encountered her in that
role. The modern veneer slipped aside and out came racial epithets or
crude sexual comments. As a young woman, she struggled to process those
situations. But she stuck with it, the thrill of giving voice to the
voiceless more powerful than the revulsion. By
the mid 1990s, after starting at William & Mary and graduating from
Hampton University, Coleman became Colonial Williamsburg’s director for
public history. She oversaw all of the historical interpreters.
One
of her first big events was an annual market day, reenacting the way
Colonial Virginians auctioned cattle and land. A staffer pointed out the
obvious: The real market would have sold slaves, too.Coleman
decided it was time to do something radical. She took a plan to upper
management to stage a live slave auction. And she would be one of those
on the sale block.The idea touched off a
national debate. “Black and white folks thought that . . . it was going
to stir up stuff that didn’t need to be stirred up in America,” Coleman
said.
A massive crowd and international media
showed up. Plainclothes police stood among the onlookers, just in case.
And Coleman and three other African Americans let themselves be sold to
the highest bidders.
Today, that event is
viewed as a landmark success in the modern retelling of American
history. After generations of avoiding the topic, other major
institutions — such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s
Montpelier — now confront enslavement as a major component of their
interpretation.
But it exacted a heavy price on
Coleman. The emotional stress brought on panic attacks that stuck with
her through years of therapy.
She never
repeated the auction. A few years later, she was wooed to Detroit to run
the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Nearly a
decade into that job, Coleman was married and had two small children and
wanted to slow things down a bit. She got word of a small museum back
home in Virginia that was looking for a shake-up. Richmond
long portrayed its past in a one-sided way. After the Civil War, widows
and wives of Confederate veterans gathered memorabilia and displayed it
in the old Confederate White House. From that collection, arguably the
most extensive of its kind anywhere, grew the Museum of the Confederacy.
The full text of the story is continued at----Full Text: Washington Post
