like a pro she said she felt like a bird up in the sky and she had a message for her late husband. collected the bell you were wrong i had a wonderful time i'm still alive and i'm one these. here watching d.w. news life from berlin coming up next there's a documentary about the museum of african-american history and culture in washington d.c. same time for that i'm a call from life for me and the entire team here i d w thanks for watching. europe we're going to. put what's become of it. what will it look like to mold. pumping for a better future isn't it. requires our culture of patience. good

questions 2019 may 26th column do you double. it's a 1st time get back people have a history that other people can see people need to understand what happened out just a whole range of emotions and sadness to. happen. it

really brings you. to focus on what our people have been through. and yes we have made strides but we have along with it really. it's astonishing you still can get a ticket i still get e-mails us you know that says tickets are now available for january and you know this is an october sickly there's an insane demand. we didn't realize that it would become both a symbol for people who want to believe in an america that lives up to its stated ideals but also has become a kind of metaphor for all that's going on in the country today one way one.

i saw a picture. of a black woman in sort of an excellent haitian and prayer hands were at this angle. and as we talked about it david j. and feel free to designers so we know that's also an angle that you see in some you sculpture in your room or post. one i started to kind of think about the museum is this crown form. it became very clear that this triple header. was actually

a beautiful weapon comes from within this universe. i really love the idea even just the shape was in. a sort of african american presence. i have an unusual sort of relationship with the history because i had been writing about the history of an effort to to build a national museum in my dissertation so i've been very carefully following sort of what had been going on in congress various sort of public and private initiatives to start start the museum. this is a museum but containing. a 100 here is it was demanded dismissed. no collection no money but never given up. today. in the middle of

washington d.c. the national museum of african american history and culture. slavery in freedom is a very large exhibition as you can tell. where it is the law our time period that we address. 15th century looking at africa and europe going all the way to the development of the nation and by the time we get to reconstruction around $877.00 so it's very important for people to understand that african-americans have always been pushing this notion of freedom against a backdrop of a nation that was coming into being based on the notion of liberty but in slavery. directly behind me is the display that speaks of the paradox of liberty on the platform we have several voices of freedom so there thomas jefferson of course

president united states still maintaining enslaved men women and children while he was putting together the document for the declaration of the constitution so when we talk about equality it's a very important think about african-american quest not only for the definition of freedom and push for how this need some of coming into being but equality is also at the core of that equality freedom. and so that's important think about today. in essence african-americans have always done one thing really well and that is they have forced america to live up to its stated ideals busy african american experience that says if you really want to treat all people equally let us push you to make sure you do that and in some ways my expectation is this museum law ways be at the heart off pushing in america to fulfill its streams of fulfill its promise.

that. slavery was. an engine that drove the global economy from the 15th through the 19th century in a very real ways and very tangible ways that created a foundation for our notions of race today back created a foundation for economic wealth for nations for corporations. around the world around the world. and we're living with the afterlives of that. when you think about the store. and how it unfolds in the museum you go down and 60 feet and you start at the year 1400 and slave trade international slave trade

begins there you know and then and the exhibit is dark it's the ceilings are lower you know and so the whole lobby off of the space is appropriate for that time and in history where the slave trade began and then you ascend and you move up and that story line really does work well with the building layout i mean it's an integrated. by the antebellum period the u.s. is an economic powerhouse based on cotton that was cultivated by inflated african-american men women and children during the transatlantic slave trade here

you see the same thing. and so it's not just an american story because again transatlantic slave trade period as you see an arts edition we look at the nation states in europe we look at denmark we look at great britain we look at france you look at spain we look at portugal. our 1st complete work into this history has been the discovery of a ship off the coast of south africa the size as a it was a ship owned by portuguese owners left lisbon and 794 so near decades after the american revolution in the midst of the haitian revolution for independence and it traveled for liz. been to mozambique i mean he's a post about. there was a loaded with 512 wasn't beacons were enslaved.

what's left from the ship is very bottom of the ship wreck site that's been battered and pounded on the coastline of south africa in very cold waters in turbulent waters nearly 100 yards from shore. so what's left is small pieces of timber. some what were once are in shackles. so very few objects but very put in the context of what this ship did and the enormity of the trade very powerful objects. and these iron bars for instance. slave traders for hundreds of years to be used to help create ballast in the bottoms of ships of all kinds. and slave ships they became

a way of helping to countermeasure their cargo that was living. is something you know that the museum down which i think is really profoundly powerful which is that when lonnie spoke about wanting to make sure that all the artifacts were real i was so happy because we forget about the aura of real things emmett till's coffin or the real a real bow of a ship which has been taken from the bottom of the ocean and brought back to you. and there is an extraordinary i think to man to really understand a history that really has not been been told and i think it's. remarkable that that lonnie and everyone involved there not only had to build a museum they had to build a collection and that was one of the really big challenges at the museum and this

was recognized even in the 1960 s. and seventy's i think the head of the sony and said well how are you going to establish a black museum that there isn't and there's no collection and so we began to then sort of identified broad subject areas that we want to do explore you want to explore the civil rights or you want to explore the role of rhythm and blues music in the $1950.00 s. and sixty's so we had that broad circle then i would encourage curators to go out and say ok how do we fill in that circle so then the question was why do you find so we can with the strategy most of the 20th century in the 19th century when a piece of the 18th century would still be in basements trunks and attics in people's homes so we created the you know we stole the idea from antique roadshow and we basically went around the country and i would say that you know. maybe an 8 year peter being really active we collected over $45000.00 artifacts of which

probably 70 percent came out of basements trunks in attics the curtains they really tells everything the good the bad the failure. afterward why competition the architects phil freelon max bond and david j. well awarded the contract for the design and construction of the museum in 2009. i 1st got wind of the project somewhere around 20042005 when george w. bush the president of the united states at that time established a commission. simply to study the possibility of the potential of a museum being located somewhere in d.c. a museum dedicated to african-american history and culture. that's. it's one of those incredible projects really it's sort of

a lot of weight but also a lot of pride for me i'm really. just thrilled to be an architect of this time to be able to engage in that this is a very useful picture that i always use which really gets you to understand where you walk in the moment this is the last to build a bill plus it's this red highlights this is the white house here and this is obviously washington's one you built lincoln this here but this is the motion to moral grounds and this is the mall coming here so we're really at this hinge moments the knuckle of the whole thing. this project was beyond just 11 firm and one person and that it would take it you know an allegiance and collaborative effort and you know as an

african-american i feel that i can bring a certain authenticity to that effort having grown up during the civil rights era and experiencing firsthand some of these seminal moments in our history. what. a museum has its most striking design feature the so-called corona to the canadian british architects a david. as an architect i draw inspiration from a lot of things but i have a deep interest in africa and africans vast for so the u.s. wherever it may be sort of trajectory history. i'm interested in it because i simply i'm african i was born on the continent i grew up in europe and i have a deep connection also to. where my family is from and where my roots are. and i

don't see any conflict about atoms. but also i'm just from a creative point of view. completely fascinated by the creative arts of the continent and i think that. there is a lot in it which teaches about the way in which to navigate the complexity of the contemporary world which i just think is not referenced or used i think the kernel is the unique sort of signature because it is the one thing that you see from a distance it's. you know it's the thing that you know that people engage with from all sides as they're coming to the to the building and it's quite unique because when you look at the assembly of all of the buildings around the national now among the national mall a lot of them are very neoclassical and even the american history museum which is the next door neighbor is still a kind of abstraction that classicism and they're sort of a large white boxes that sit on pedestals and so this sort of deconstructs i think

you know that the design that you know that david david alger as the lead designer of the team sort of came up with really begins to unpack and deconstruct that and gives it a different sort of presence on the mall. this is one of the 1st sketches to find the front. of the building. this is this was. option 3. which was really looking at the notion of the pavilion building on the landscape so this is really explaining this idea of the upward form and lights filtering and this building within the building it's a shape that you don't often see in western architecture and i'm hard pressed to think of another building that has that explicit a shape that is moving upwards and is aspirational that. tory above ground so these are the early studies which looked at how we were kind of controlling the program as you can see from the project in the end there's

a lot on the ground and in the beginning we were trying to bring quite a bit of that program above ground to try to reduce costs so we were looking at how that could work as landscape and how the corona would sit on top but what the final scheme started to become so this is one of the early studies was that we started to look at reducing that base and really starting to think about bringing most of the building on the ground until we started to get to this form what starts to come up is just then the corona and the corona is the main form of the building. in thinking about the materiality of the building we will realise it of course from we came in brahms was going to work with so beginning we even tried to make it a real blow supposable bronze it's. the probably this is not it's not construction only very proud oh but wait the shape of what was clipped youthful is the tonality the texture the way in which it collects of light so we started to

look at the material where the it was really out of a 1000000 but also coated with a bronze liquid bronze coating that's been polished and subsume realize that this was starting to give us the modeling that we really really enjoy and it started to catch the light very beautifully you just it was light you could lift it up very easily and you could see the sunlight how it just picked up the luminosity of the light the nuances on this. even in darkness it has a cost of quality and the notion of bronze being this this ancient material that. that suggests longevity and permanence and quality and really historical way that goes back centuries you know that that was an ikea smile. and then there's also it's just the story of the pattern that that it has and and

why it produces this kind of dappled light on the inside and that's a reference to the tradition of african-american both in slaves in free blacksmiths who made a lot of the screens that you see in places like charleston and new orleans. lonnie bunch says something like it's history hiding in plain sight which is something we should be reminded. of. so once we understood the form and we realized that we wanted to make a cube form we realized that the front of the mall the front entrance is south so it's really the hottest part of the building and we wanted to make a welcome porch which would mediate the climate from the outside to the inside of the building months and we conceptualize this idea of the law porch which would be a device with the water pool which you qunu and start to bring you into the climate

of the building. the porch is another element sort of like that corona that is making references to. sort of cultural forms of of architecture essentially it is a new. steel and concrete structure held on to columns and it's only been 50 feet out and it's $200.00. 10 feet across and when you're under it you need to feel like this is a home run play like a floating carpet because the structure is really something big engineering feat. but some historians that said it actually comes from western africa migrates to places the caribbean like haiti. and in terms of it a 2 room form that has a kind of veranda on it with the haitian revolution and there are a number of of the enslaved that are taken by their masters to new orleans to the

form then migrates to new orleans and so the porch then becomes a sort of space that mediates between the house and and the street because it's very hot and you know and so you could sit up there you could you could converse with people so it becomes a very very very important social space. if you want to understand american notions of resiliency or optimism or spirituality you've got to look to the african-american community but even more importantly than that african-american experience has shaped the founding of the country shaped the writing of the constitution shaped politics shaped culture shaped education became the sort of battlegrounds in the $1950.00 s. and sixty's on how america should be seen in the world so you had many push and pulls that out of the sort of right right of african-americans to be able to tell

their own story and deal with difficult history is. the idea for a museum dedicated to african-americans. it was 1st put forward in 1915 by black veterans of the civil war years later the call was picked up and pushed by members of the civil rights generation was one day similar 68 in 2003 president george w. bush authorized the legislation for the establishment of a new smithsonian museum the national museum of african-american history and culture thank you. thank you

thank you thank you but this place is more than a building. on september 24th 2016 all those who contribution to the realisation of the project celebrate the fulfillment of the doing of the century. is a monument no less than the others on this mall world on this day 1009 year old ruth bona and her great granddaughter will ring the bell of the oldest black baptist church in the usa and officially opened the museum. through finding a spot of god was born a slave in mississippi only a few generations separate the present from history. and. a few weeks after the opening america elected a new president who says we will meet one life.

as a historian i really believe that history is this amazing tool that gives you guys . it's an tools to live your life and so i think that by helping people 1st of all understand how the construction of blackness and how that really did was create a false sense of difference between people and to help people understand how in many ways that notion of calling somebody the other really allowed people to brutalize people and treat them in our ways so we think that if we can help people understand the roots of that and begin to see these people as individuals rather

than as a group we begin to have a kind of conversation. through 100000 square feet of exhibition space spread across 8 levels the museum explores america's history through the lens of the african-american experience. the changing america exhibition is the 3rd of the history exhibitions so it followed on the exhibition about slavery and freedom and then the era of segregation we wanted to have this exhibition take the notion of a series of changes that have happened leaving from the civil rights movement and especially the black power movement through the last 5 decades of american history

. we allow people literally to create we are their memory with images with artifacts but we allow them to think through their own reactions and create their own most recent history rather than us trying to interpret their history for them. telling the story. what's happening in the black power era it's really entered with the black arts movement in fact some of the leaders of the black arts movement that black power and black arts are sister concepts and so there's a cultural revolution happening at the same time that there's a kind of political revolution for example within the black power era one of the things that is really key is that changing notions of how black people are represented whether it's in television how black authors are writing about black communities white filmmakers are really looking for ways that african-americans in

that period are really rejecting stereotypes they're rejecting the ways that their identity had been codified by sort of kind of race this and racial undertones and are choosing for themselves how to write in best case we're looking at a pin that says black is beautiful we're also looking at the 2 afro picks the one with the black power one afro because when it's from god and the other one is plastic but it has a black power fist right at the top and so you see style and power going together black is beautiful is the pin that we have right about that i think one of the things we're really talking about in a changing america of african-americans have really been at the center how the nation has developed you see it through the slave exhibition you see it in segregation and when you get to the 1960 s. and there's really. a new day in terms of how african-americans are picturing themselves and identifying and the culture that comes out of. being american

popular culture and. the building it's really conceived as a target it's very much seen as a journey. you caliphate and. you see if it's you can only speak for me more came to being a treetop there are lights on. feel every and there's a sense of movement and uplift. america would not have the culture that it has today without the contribution of african-americans and that museum tells the story.

a lot of times people look at what artists that we feel should be well known and artist that were actually well known within an african-american community of artists and collectors and use them and have always been considered very important but are just now being recognized in the larger art world. the piece behind me is called the mothership and it's by contemporary artists named jefferson pender and jefferson is a huge site so he's interested in this idea of afro futurism and afro

futurism really reflects the idea that in the future will be a time when all people are equal in race won't be an issue gender won't be an issue . the piece intersects with other areas of the museum so in the music gallery we have the seminal piece called the mothership which was a prop that george clinton used during his performances he was also sort of one of the for. 1st effort futurism in the united states and the peace will come down from the stage and was really very influential in the music industry. and while the museum were in the formative stages it was really about looking back how do we find the stuff of history well once we opened i said it's important to look forward to say if you're a curator or director 50 years from now. what stories what artifacts what material would help you understand 2017. we have what we call

robert response collecting or i call it contemporary collecting and i thought about how do we collect contemporary history in the same way that we might collect contemporary art so you look at those moments of paradigmatic ships right so you have an artifact that represents a chains a shift in the way people see themselves the way they see the world the way they express themselves. this is a photograph by devon allen it was taken in april 2015 and it's really emblematic of the kinds of collecting we do around the rapid response or

contemporary collecting shortly after devon island took this photograph it went viral on the internet and it becomes a part of the twitter net and people are just like reanna and jay z. and beyonce and ice cube they're also sharing this image online and other images by devon allen who lives in baltimore but with even within a week 2 weeks or so after this image goes viral and it's all over the world seen all over the world and makes the cover of time magazine so this image here and it being on time magazine and the fact that it's being shared all over the world like instantaneously all of that represents the apparent the magic shift that i was talking about. so those moments in history looking back hindsight are those my. that changed things for us so our collecting

say around black lives matter movement represented that because we saw things changing in terms of how the message was shared with people how quickly communities mobilize how mobilization changed they didn't need the media they didn't need the church they didn't need any of those old forms of mobilizing the community and so overnight you can bring an entire nation together around a cause after black lives matter after social media social justice and community mobilization can never be the same again. in some ways the museum's 1st year transcended all we can know you know while we

built a place that we hoped would be important we didn't realize it would become this pilgrimage site. in the 1st year we had 3000000 visitors we had hoped for about 4000 visitors a day we're getting 728000 visitors a day. it has become one of the hardest tickets to get in america. but there were also many people who really felt that the vote this was racist if we created this museum there were a lot of people a lot of white supremacists who attack the museum there were web sites attacking us . even when i write off beds in the newspapers around athletes in protest or suddenly you get paid. as much as you get support for us one of the saddest moments was when somebody left a noose in the museum. and

a noose is a symbol of the violence that african-americans have experienced throughout their career and to be able to have somebody leave a news really reminded me in her mind of the stand that's exactly why this museum is here when you think of the brutality of slavery. and then you think of the evolution and the achievement and the progress despite those struggles and the ability to have a vision. and the ability to in fact. create something that was unique. to the american culture. it was not emotional to look emotional coming from the basement where with things started it coming up to the top and seeing that so much stuff is still going on you

know racism is still there talent to still post and make lists of it was emotional . an experience that i think not only does every african americans need to see they think every human needs to see this because this kind of gets you into thinking again why do we do the things we do why are we in the positions we are in what can we do to change the status quo education i think education is key to everything a lot of people are misinformed by that's the main point of the museum itself and so if you how pictures in media can distort something to look a certain way and the story has not been told that not only not been told that you get friends coming by you something that we have heard by those in power. had. they're going to this there are a couple instances where they took things that were in the american history museum

artifacts and then put them in a different context you know like oh it has all these like really awful historical competitions the way they told me don't tell you about the american history it's. the building seems to have kind of created a kind of galvanizing quality it's sort of become a sort of. rallying cry a sort of place of a sort of protest as well which was not kind of what i thought about that but i i miss it and. i. tell you some of. the. time it comes back to where. we started but i. know people who live there are like my. 1st march. so i would give it to you they are.

our thank you i thank donald sterling silver. so it probably makes them that. when you go back. during you know civil rights you start to wonder. what i have that much courage. as a lot of those other people you know where would i be if it was me and the time. who would i be. the power of seeing for me people gathered under it under the porch gathered around it is as deeply it's i mean it's deeply moving and so for me it's almost you know like tearful because you see. to feel like you have made something that has resonated with people and gives them the agency that they require to deal with

something which is so complicated busy. we were 8 years in power is the title of the latest book by tennessee cults one of the main contributors to the discourse on a conflict ridden relationship between black and white americans. in the 8 years in power maybe elf or in the new museum the dialogue is more powerful than ever. i think of this museum long after i'm gone or to be the place that becomes that safe ground for people to come and grapple with what's separating them that this sort of be the place that tells the candid truth the unvarnished truth so that you

deal with things that are painful but it also ought to be the place that allows us not just to see african-americans as people who struggle but african-americans as people who loved who lived who built and so what you really hope is that in the future this will help people see a more complete fuller notion of black america and then by extension a fuller sense of what america can mean. and a lot of her just want to be right. they just want to be right you know i mean it's like you know everything i say and the whole authority is be a right and i have always felt like my authority is in being an honest you know i'll be straight with you i don't mean ima be right but i will be straight. i'm excited about how. the telling of our stories continues. you know on end to the deep into the 21st century you know the story is not over it's not complete

and the smithsonian and body bunch and the staff have anticipated that and left. anough roam both programatic lee and physically for the story to evolve and continue to be told i'm looking forward to. being a part of that. how. i. am. was going. to.

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news live from berlin in the us marathon election process nears its end voters cast their ballots and delhi and other areas in a poll that could see the governing be j.p. significantly weekend also coming up. anti-government protests and albania turned violent demonstrators throw molotov cocktails flares and firecrackers as they demand the government resign and call some fresh elections.