Some 300 people attended a jubilant and emotional event in downtown Baltimore yesterday to mark the start of what is designed to be the East Coast's largest museum devoted to the African-American experience.
Shirley Contee arrived early for the ground-breaking ceremony. She was intent upon getting a seat in the tent that had been set up at the future museum site at Pratt and President streets.
As a girl in the 1940s and '50s, Contee, 68, developed a sense of black heritage that came from her family and the nuns who taught her at St. Frances Academy.
Back then, she only had to step outside to be reminded of the struggle blacks faced daily. "Segregation," Contee said, "was everywhere."
To her, the city is long overdue for a museum that will tell her people's story, good and bad - and in a prominent Inner Harbor spot. She intends to be among the first to visit the $33 million Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, set to open in 2004.
"What we know from the past can keep a lot of things from happening in the future," she said before the event. And triumphs of old - the fight for civil rights, say - can inspire new generations: "This is our history, something to be proud of."
The five-story museum will be paid for mostly with state money. It is named for the late Baltimore-born financier Reginald F. Lewis because his family's foundation has pledged $5 million for an endowment.
Yesterday's ceremony symbolically ended a decade-long quest to find the necessary money and a fitting site for the museum. That effort was led largely by George L. Russell Jr., a prominent lawyer who was the first African-American on Baltimore's circuit court.
At the podium, Russell spoke of Gov.-elect Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.
"Somehow, he selected a black man to be lieutenant governor, and that man won," Russell said, referring to Lt. Gov.-elect Michael S. Steele. "For that, governor, you will be in the museum without question."
Russell, the museum's chairman, asked the audience to give Ehrlich a standing ovation, and they did. The incoming governor, a Republican, thanked Russell for the honor. Ehrlich told the crowd: "It's a great day of celebration for our city, for our state, for the diversity which makes us so strong."
The state-owned museum, to be clad in distinctive black granite and accented by a curving red wall, will encompass about 82,000 square feet, second in size only to an African-American museum in Detroit.
Plans call for the permanent exhibits to be divided into three themes: Labor That Built A Nation, Family & Community and Arts & Enlightenment.
The museum is also scheduled to have an area where visitors can trace family trees, a distance learning center that will offer online classes, a studio for recording and listening to oral histories, a 200-seat theater and a cafe, gift shop and conservation lab.
To increase the museum's reach, the state Department of Education will devise lesson plans and organize visits for the state's 850,000 public school pupils at some point in their schooling, said Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick.
Yesterday's ground-breaking attracted a number of prominent local figures. U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings said that as a boy he would ride the bus downtown just to see Russell practice law. Del. Howard P. Rawlings, a Baltimore Democrat who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, recalled the years-long push to secure state support for the museum.
There also were more than a dozen relatives and business associates of Lewis, who died in 1993 at age 50. At the time, Lewis ran the $1 billion TLC Beatrice International Holdings, the nation's largest black-owned business.
"My heart was really full because this was one of the goals my husband set before he died," said his widow, Loida Lewis, after seeing a rendering of the museum on a billboard.
An exuberant Filipino woman with a noticeable accent, she said Russell often kids her about her mangling of American idioms. That did not deter her yesterday. To the General Assembly, the museum's board, the state Board of Public Works, Russell and others, she said with considerable feeling, "Go on with your bad self!"
The string of speeches ended with a sermon-like exhortation from Kweisi Mfume, president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mfume invoked the names of such famous black achievers from Maryland as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Eubie Blake and Thurgood Marshall.
But he also talked about those who struggled anonymously against discrimination and worse.
"As we stand here today, let us think about those who thought about this but never had the power to bring it into existence, nameless and faceless as they were."