Charleston was the principal port of entry for African slaves into British North America. After repressing this collective memory for generations, city officials have concluded that the time is right to begin planning a slavery museum that would be the largest of its kind in the United States.
The museum could become a national and perhaps international attraction, especially among African-American, and Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said it would fuel Charleston's tourist-driven economic boom.
It would also be one of the most daring steps yet taken to bring the story of slavery to large numbers of people in the South, where there are still many monuments to Confederate heroes and where generations of politicians embraced the view that slave life was not all that bad.
The depth of those attitudes was reflected in the recent battle over the flying of a Confederate banner over South Carolina's State Capitol in Columbia. Last year a compromise was reached in which the banner was moved to a nearby spot, but the conflict and left a residue of bitterness. Debates over questions like the right of labor organizers sometimes take on racial overtones here.
"For a long time I would have said that people here aren't ready to take another look at this history of ours, maybe a more honest look, but that's not the case anymore," Mayor Riley said. "Not just this community but the whole country has matured in terms of our willingness to confront slavery. We as a culture need to do this as part of our progress in coming together and healing."
Mayor Riley is working on two projects aimed at telling the story of the slave trade here. The first will be a small museum in a downtown building known as the Slave Mart, which is the only place in Charleston where slaves are known to have been bought and sold. Renovation of the Slave Mart is under way, and the museum is expected to open within a year. It will be part of a statewide network of sites connected to African-American history.
A much larger and more ambitious plan to build a museum of slavery is also on the drawing boards. Mayor Riley said he had considered the idea in the past, but that it became especially attractive after the city demolished a housing project and found itself with a 10-acre waterfront site adjacent to the aquarium.
He estimated that the museum would cost $30 million to $35 million, most of which he hopes to raise from private donors, he said, adding that planning and construction would be "a five-year project." "It would be a story museum that would talk about this tragic human practice, which is very old, then about how the slave trade began in Africa, about the passage, which was horrific, and about the sale of slaves and their lives here," the mayor said. "It would go beyond emancipation to about 1900, covering the period of Jim Crow in the South, the search for economic opportunity and the transition of a people from slavery to freedom in that time."
"I see this as a national museum that would be of interest to African- Americans and everyone else in our country," he said. "The Holocaust Museum in Washington is interesting to all people. Museums about Native Americans are interesting to all people. This is a part of our nation's history that just hasn't been presented."
Mayor Riley, a Democrat, has not yet asked the City Council to approve spending public money on the museum. But his enormous popularity — he has been in office since 1975 and routinely wins re-election with more than two-thirds of the vote — suggests that other officials will fall into line behind him.
"It's a decisive factor," said Yvonne Evans, a City Council member. "There have been a few things he wanted that he hasn't gotten, but not very many." Ms. Evans said the City Council might approve the project as early as this year. The project has not yet aroused widespread interest in Charleston's African-American residents, who make up about one-third of the total population, but the Rev. Joseph Darby, a local pastor, predicted that interest would rise with the approach of the groundbreaking.
"If it's a museum that emphasizes not only tragedy but also triumph over adversity by many Americans of African descent, if it's tasteful and sensitive and frank, it will be a good thing," he said. "This is South Carolina. We have people here who think that Appomattox was a cease-fire, that the Civil War wasn't fought about slavery and that good treatment of slaves was the rule rather than the exception."
The few small museums in places like Louisiana and Maryland that tell parts of the story of slavery do not approach the scale of what is planned for Charleston. A plan for a national museum of African-American history, offered in the 1980's by the Smithsonian Institution, foundered for a variety of reasons, but a new version has won the support of several influential members of Congress. They are sponsoring a bill to provide $25 million in public and private funds for a museum that would include exhibits about slavery and the civil rights movement.
Charleston emerged as a center of the slave trade during the 18th century. About 40 percent of all slaves brought into the British colonies of North America first landed here. By the 1770's ships were disgorging more than 4,000 slaves here each year. The census of 1790 showed 107,000 slaves in South Carolina, about 42 percent of the population.
With such a large slave population, it was perhaps inevitable that rumors of uprisings periodically terrified local whites. The most famous of these planned revolts was thwarted in 1822 with the arrest and subsequent hanging of a free black man, Denmark Vesey, who was allegedly plotting a mass murder of whites. Some today doubt that Vesey's plan was as bloody as it was then portrayed, among them Mayor Riley.
In an outer corridor of Charleston's municipal auditorium there hangs an unmarked painting of a black man, visible only from the back, addressing a congregation. It is said to depict Vesey. People here, however, remain uncertain how to deal with his story. The planned new museum will try to present it in a balanced manner, but no approach to either Vesey or slavery in general can be expected to pass without controversy.
The way complex historical stories like this are presented in museums has become increasingly controversial as various groups seek to have their perspectives represented. Planners of the Charleston museum are braced for debate.
"Replication of the past in museums has become a very politically charged subject," said Richard Rabinowitz, who heads a New York consulting concern that is working with Charleston officials to plan the slavery museum. "There are going to be people in Charleston who will ask why we're bringing up all this old stuff all over again. But there are a lot of people there, not just in the Afro-American community, who sense that this is an untold story that has to be brought to the surface. It's a fundamental fact we have to come to grips with."
In January Mr. Rabinowitz held a workshop here for about 25 city officials and other residents to discuss what he called "the scope and focus and scale and purposes of such a museum." He delivered a report to Mayor Riley in March, and since then the two men have had what he called "some very general conversations about how to move ahead, although the city hasn't made a final decision yet."
"The heart of the issue would be the role of Charleston in the creation of the economic system, physical landscape and political order that was built around slavery," he said. "Charleston is one of the places where this narrative was most powerfully played out."
Organizers of the annual Spoleto Festival, which brings people from across the South and beyond to Charleston for 17 days of theater, music and dance, have begun making their own efforts to explore this aspect of Charleston's history. A city-sponsored agency that works with festival organizers has hired an experienced museum curator, Mary Jane Jacob, to spend three years working with visual artists who are interested in local history.
"I was here 10 years ago, and there wasn't such a receptivity to dealing with issues of slavery and African-American history," Ms. Jacob said. "That's changed now. People understand that the economy of this region was built on the back of people forced to labor."
One black artist who participated in this year's festival, Colin Quashie, built a free-standing window and moved it to several spots around Charleston where African-American history unfolded but where there is no marker or memorial.
"Charleston is a town that sells itself on its history, but it only markets certain kinds of history," Mr. Quashie said. "Huge numbers of African-Americans in this country have ancestors who came through Charleston. This is our Ellis Island. But there's a constant overlooking of this, and people find it very, very irritating. It's not about inclusion until they figure out a way to market it."
Planning for the slavery museum is in its early stages, and no one has yet publicly opposed it. Even Mayor Riley's support and the likelihood that the museum would bring economic benefit to the city, however, may not be enough to erase attitudes that are deeply entrenched here.
"This is a very difficult thing for us to face, not just because of the history itself, but because that history directly shapes the way we look at the world today," said Neill Bogan, a Mississippi-born historian and artist who is conducting research in Charleston. "If we change the way we perceive history, we change what we think of the Confederacy and of this overpowering heritage we've assimilated over generations. That affects politics, social relations and our whole culture. It has implications that people aren't always anxious to face."