If you need a dose of inspiration or fortitude after this spring’s divisive, demeaning elections, consider a trip to our city’s art deco treasure, Fair Park. Exhibits at the newly renovated African American Museum and the Hall of State can give you hope. If you need an added incentive, here’s one: they’re free.
The African American Museum, in the northwestern end of Fair Park, recently reopened after a flurry of construction. State and private grants have helped it upgrade basic building systems, such as HVAC and security, and enhance its capabilities as a cultural institution. For example, new air conditioning makes the museum more comfortable for visitors, but also allows staff to closely control humidity, which is important to preserving artifacts, documents and artwork.
All the construction is intended to safeguard its collections and make them more accessible to the public, whether they visit in-person or online. New conservation labs have large windows so visitors can watch staff as they examine and process materials. Photographs will be digitized.
The museum is expanding partnerships with local nonprofits and educational institutions, including Dallas ISD. On a recent weekday, college students from North Texas were learning about Dallas’ Tenth Street Historic District, a former freedman’s town, as part of a summer fellowship that introduces them to museum-related professions.
The museum’s new exhibit about Nelson Mandela offers history and hope. The traveling exhibit is spread across four galleries. It follows the South African leader from his childhood in a relatively rural area to his experiences as a young Black man and college student in a nation that practiced strict racial segregation, a system later known as apartheid. It describes his political activism, years of imprisonment and eventually, his freedom. It then moves into the dismantling of apartheid and Mandela’s election as president in 1994.
Mandela always leaned toward reconciliation, rather than retribution. His attitude allowed South Africans of all races a path out of a bitter past. It is an approach more U.S. politicians should follow.
Another dose of hope and inspiration is available at the Hall of State. A broadside copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which normally lives at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, is on display alongside panels about the Texas Declaration of Independence and other key documents. Another exhibit focuses on Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when a Union general arrived in Galveston and finally enforced the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery.
In a season when we celebrate freedom, don’t miss these uplifting lessons.
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