Levenson’s Guide: National Center for Civil and Human Rights

[lethalweapon3]

Address: 100 Ivan Allen Jr. Boulevard, Atlanta, GA 30313

 

 

What Is It: A museum with exhibition space that delves into the American struggle for, and achievements in, civil rights here and human rights abroad, the former infused with plenty of both Atlanta and U.S. Southern history.

 

What Are THOSE?: Particularly when Black History Month rolls around, interests rise in expanding or refreshing one’s knowledge base as it pertains to the contributions of Americans to the causes of civil and human rights, and the challenges they face along the way.

Often those terms are used interchangeably, but in general, “human rights” are moral principles founded in the recognition that everyone’s inherently entitled, simply by virtue of being human, to sharing a place and having a role in any civilized society.

 

Normative rules are established at multiple levels of governance and law around the globe, protecting people from human behaviors and decisions that could violate human rights. The United Nations established a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, today cited by Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s “most translated document.” Today’s annual day to call attention to the need to end “modern slavery”, promoted by the “End It” movement, is but one example of global human rights advocacy.

Human rights are seen as an umbrella under which multiple classes of rights, if you will, stay dry. Among those classes, “civil rights” serve as insurance for the lives and livelihoods of citizens, specifically protection from discrimination on many grounds… most popularly in America, on matters of race and national origin.

On the grounds of curbing discrimination in America, Congress began passing “civil rights acts” after the Civil War. The initial one, in 1866, established that emancipated slaves and anyone born in the U.S. regardless of race (excepting American Indians) are citizens of this nation. Fears that such a bill could not be passed through Congress (one with influential Southern members after the war) led to the development of a 14^th constitutional amendment, ratified in 1868. Nearly a dozen subsequent “civil rights” acts were passed by Congress, the most recent made law in 1991.

 

History: This museum centers its initial focus on the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) led largely by African-Americans from 1954 to 1968. Widows of two prominent civil rights leaders, Joseph Lowery and Ralph David Abernathy, initially conceived the establishment of an Atlanta-based museum that commemorated the role of Atlanta citizens in the areas of both human and civil rights.

Prominent leaders themselves, Evelyn Gibson Lowery (pictured above, d. 2013) and Juanita Abernathy collaborated with two other key CRM figures, former Mayor and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and current U.S. Representative John Lewis. The group approached the City of Atlanta (specifically, then-Mayor Shirley Franklin) with its proposal in 2001.

At that time, Atlanta was still in the afterglow of hosting the 1996 Olympics, and interest in expanding the Centennial Olympic Park area as a tourist and local visitor center was a civic priority. Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus announced his plans for the Georgia Aquarium in 2001, on land donated across from the park donated by The Coca-Cola Company, whose headquarters looms over the property from nearby. Coke wanted a more modern “World of Coca-Cola” museum than the one that sat beside Underground Atlanta. The company re-designated their bulldozed and purchased land as “Pemberton Place”, named after the founder of Coca-Cola, to host a collection of visitor sites.

There was considerable push to establish a civil and human rights center on or near the Auburn Avenue site of Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Park, located east of downtown and near the Carter Center. But the likelihood of greater foot traffic from the park, aquarium, hotels and arena/stadium sites was the prevailing consideration. Delta Air Lines and Falcons owner Arthur Blank contributed millions in fundraising, backed by local tax allocation district funds, to help the National Center’s foundation build the museum at Pemberton Place.

Groundbreaking was delayed, and the design downscaled, during the Great Recession as fundraising slowed. But the National Center finally opened to the public in June 2014.

 

 

Today:

 

Inside the 43,000-square-foot space, particularly amid the CRM gallery, you can’t help but sense a theatrical performance is about to break out. That’s largely because the curator and the lead creative officer guided stage direction and set design for numerous prominent Broadway productions. The exhibitions seek to engage attendees with a blend of historical photography and footage, graphics, 3-D displays, audiovisuals, and interactives that help establish a fuller sense of place and time, and a stronger connection with the movements’ diverse participants.

 

 

Exhibitions:

Once you’re ushered into the CRM exhibition, “Rolls Down Like Water: The American Civil Rights Movement,” you’re presented with two vibrant walls of life in the 1950s South… segregated by race. Much of the presentations feature Atlanta after nearly a century of rising from the ashes, building solid industrial economies along dual tracks of “White” and “Colored.” While there was considerable effort to keep things as separate as possible, backed by “Jim Crow” laws of the day, it becomes clear from the exhibits that things were decidedly unequal.

The extent of the resistance brought on by the U.S. Supreme Court’s pivotal 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to strike down state-sponsored segregation is powerful and unnerving. The emergence of civic and political leaders pushing for integration runs smack into powerful alliances insistent on maintaining a sense (for them) of “order”.

Matters weren’t purely Black-and-White (Christian) at the time. The exhibit includes the 1958 bombing of The Temple in Midtown Atlanta, ostensibly an attempt by supremacists to intimidate Jewish citizens from using the synagogue as a center for civil rights advocacy. An echo of this bombing would come to Atlanta about four decades later.

The roles of White central-city political and business leaders like Mayors William Hartsfield, Ivan Allen, Jr. and newspaper editor Ralph McGill are brought forward as icons of the Atlanta elite’s boosterism mentality to present itself exceptionally as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” foremost for the sake of the local economy. It’s probable that an international airport isn’t sited here, and pro sports teams from places like St. Louis and Milwaukee don’t look to relocate here, without the stances by Atlanta boosters to dampen resistance to the CRM.

While I won’t give away too much here, the star feature in the exhibit is the interactive “lunch counter sit-in,” modeled after the prominent demonstrations begun in the North in the late 1930s, and applied to places like Greensboro and Nashville during the rise in student participation in the CRM. At the risk of being reductive, for the uninitiated, this “hands-on” interactive shares commonality with the Beverly soda tasting experience at the World of Coke next door. It’s brief and highly discomforting, yet you’ll find yourself hoping friends will share the experience (hopefully, not relive it) during their visits.

Other strong takeaways include the stories of the Freedom Riders, where you gain a good sense of the magnitude of men and women of many backgrounds contributing to the cause of desegregation in public accommodations like bus terminals, and the heavy tolls inflicted upon them by fellow citizens and law enforcement agencies alike. The exhibits exquisitely detail the covert and overt threats to life, liberty and property during the time, from the church bombing in Birmingham to the assassination and funeral of Atlanta native MLK.

Along the way you learn of the lives of so many prominent leaders pushing the cause of civil rights, forging new alliances, and ensuring their issues remained front-and-center for debate in city halls, state houses and the White House.

The CRM exhibits lead museum-goers upwards to “Spark of Conviction: the Global Human Rights Movement”, a transition from the drab and dour scenes of CRM martyrdom toward the light and brighter promises of modernity. The starkness of the shift tends to give the impression that, while deep struggles for rights here and abroad remain, we have come a long way in many respects.

If you’ve been to more than your share of “national/international” civil rights museums in Memphis, Greensboro, and Birmingham, among other places, it is this permanent human rights exhibit that distinguishes The Center, invoking the museum’s relevance to this Olympic metropolis of global commerce.  The curator for this exhibit worked extensively with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the affiliated Center for the Prevention of Genocide.

The exhibit seeks to remind attendees that there are human rights being fought for along many lines around the globe, whether it pertains to suffrage and women’s rights, to those for individuals with disabilities, religious minorities, LGBT citizens, children, immigrants, and industrial workers. Audiovisual displays detailing these concerns are presented together in a hall that shines daylight through a global window-map. The resistance to human rights advancement is well-displayed by a “rogues gallery” of murderous dictators and other committers of government-enforced human atrocities from many continents.

One simple yet effective set of displays challenge users to consider their “ethical footprint,” specifically the products we consume (from flowers to chocolate to sneakers, and so on) whose economies often rest on the suppression of others’ rights.

I disagree with the notion, presented by then-New York Times arts critic Edward Rothstein, that the inclusion of exhibits centering on human rights “diminishes,” somehow, the significance of the civil rights movement. Rather, Gandhian principles and the efforts to advance women’s and workers’ rights not only helped inform the concepts and practices of the CRM. Together, with the lessons learned from the CRM, they helped form a basis by which sociopolitical gains are being made today. These views are reinforced by the Human Rights exhibit.

People that come interested in purely a portrayal of civil rights struggles in the American South may find this exhibit off-putting. Yet millions of dollars spent on another museum that starts and ends with the CRM would have been a sadly shortsighted endeavor.

I do concur with Rothstein that the Global Human Rights exhibit can come across as “arbitrary”: how to properly convey the issues of rights for different classes of people, extensively enough for everyone’s satisfaction, but concisely so visitors don’t tune out? That issue, and the struggle to mesh it with the CRM exhibit, is in part ascribable to the downscaling of the museum design, cut roughly in half due to the Recession.

It is a “National” Center, and while the international aspects are important, I felt that more focus in this exhibit could be directed toward Americans who have fought for specific human rights causes, both here and abroad, and the instances in which our government and the U.N. use non-violent means to achieve positive ends. In this exhibition, some of the large-table interactives during my visit were either not functioning (unfortunate, for such a new museum) or too vague in their intent to spark interest.

I concluded my trip by visiting “Voice of the Voiceless: The Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection.” The central City of Atlanta figure to promote the museum’s development, Mayor Franklin also managed to form a coalition that acquired and preserved many of Dr. King’s papers and letters after his estate elected to sell them via auction. It’s a “rotating exhibit” of MLK artifacts, encouraging visitors to return periodically. In this quiet hall, you’ll find a photographed mural of one of his bookshelves, with items as King left them at the time of his assassination.

There is ample space for meetings and group events here, as our Atlanta Hawks can attest. Led by the team’s still-fairly-new chief diversity and inclusion officer, Nzinga Shaw, the Hawks are convening a series at the Center called “MOSAIC: Model of Shaping Atlanta through Interactive Conversations.” MOSAIC initiated last month with a panel discussion on Race and Gender in Sports, which incidentally allowed for local activists still sounding off about You Know What to be engaged in frank discussions about the state of the Hawks organization. Board member Grant Hill and his mother, Janet, were among the panelists.

Hawks big man Mike Muscala, guard Kyle Korver, and former Hawks Justin Holiday and Elton Brand have guided kids through the museum on several occasions.

 

You may have heard me mention before that, in July 1996, I was rocking-and-rolling late one evening at the celebratory round-the-clock Centennial Olympic Park concerts. But for a quirk of fate, I had planned to be in the park at the same time one night later -- the night of the park bombing. I stood within feet of the eventual site of the blast just over 24 hours before.

 

Through this and subsequent bombing attacks, the perpetrator sought to use violence and mayhem to further his and his colleagues’ objectives, specifically to suppress the rights of women, LGBT citizens and racial minorities through fear and intimidation, and to seize back an increasingly less-complicit government along the way. Standing just a stone’s throw away from the site of the blast 20 years later, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights is a testament to the fact that his ultimate aims were left to the untidy dustbin of American history.

 

Tips:

• Tix are currently $15 a pop for adults, with small discounts available for seniors, students, and educators with photo ID. It’s $10 for kids aged 4-through-12, and free for yung’uns aged 3-and-below.
• The Center asks that you set aside 75 minutes to take in the museum in its entirety. I’d suggest saving time (roughly 15 minutes) for the Morehouse-MLK collection at the end of the tour. The first-floor gift shop is pretty standard stuff, from koozies and tees to books and portraits.
• The museum is Closed on Mondays. During the rest of the week, it’s open until 5:00 PM but closes its admissions at 4:00 PM. It’s very possible to swing an afternoon trip and enjoy a post-tour respite prior to an 8:00 PM Hawks game. But call ahead if you’re coordinating a large group.
• There is a stunningly beautiful fountain, featuring inspiring quotes from Nelson Mandela and Margaret Mead, on the plaza facing Ivan Allen Boulevard near Centennial Olympic Park Drive. With angles of downtown in the background, this plaza is great for picture taking. It is NOT, however, the entrance...
• That entrance is up a winding set of concrete stairs to the shared Pemberton Place plaza, which should be your starting point across from the Park at Baker Street. Accessibility is more than adequate once you’re inside the museum. But if stairs give you or your fellow patrons trouble, ask a staffer for assistance in accessing the fountain plaza, as the doors back to the museum are locked to the outside.
• You’ll be encouraged to bring children with you on future visits to The Center. As with any museum with displays of human atrocities and discussions of uncomfortable content, you may prefer to pre-screen your visit if you’ve got kids with you (pre-teens, specifically). The Center maintains an “Across Generations” family guide available for free in PDF format online. The guide includes some discussion items for the family to share during and after their visit.
• A trip to see all the Pemberton Place attractions (Georgia Aquarium, The Center, World of Coke) all in one afternoon would, frankly, wear me out, especially with kids or larger groups in tow. Take in maybe one or two of them in a day, preferably after lunch.
• The aquarium + civil&human rights visits feel like it would be a bit much if taken together, but either of the two with World of Coke would work fine. Another option, as a more lighthearted balance, would be the College Football Hall of Fame, a couple blocks around the corner on Marietta Street. An even quicker option is the Studio Tour at CNN Center, on the opposite end of Centennial Olympic Park.
• If you plan on seeing at least three attractions in one weekend trip, look into the Atlanta CityPASS. You get combined admission for up to five attractions while saving at least 40 percent on current fees.
• For grub, there’s a café in the Pemberton Place plaza that I didn’t bother to visit as it looked kinda touristy. There are a variety of restaurants around the park (kids always dig Johnny Rocket’s), and along Marietta Street. Mellow Mushroom Pizza is a couple blocks east (toward downtown) along Ivan Allen Boulevard.

 

 

From Philips Arena: Walk north along Centennial Olympic Park Drive, or through the park, to the plaza entrance across Baker Street for the Aquarium and World of Coke (don’t bother asking around about directions to Pemberton Place, as nobody knows the area by that name.) The Center is located directly behind the World of Coke. If you’re driving, take Marietta Street north to Ivan Allen Boulevard and swing a right. Past the first light, there’s a shared Pemberton Place parking deck for these three attractions situated adjacent to the aquarium, although the parking decks along Marietta Street tend to be cheaper.

From MARTA: From the North/South (Red and Gold) Lines, Civic Center MARTA station is the best means of accessing the museums. Walk toward downtown from the station and turn at the first right down Ivan Allen Boulevard. Including a crossing over the Interstates, there’s three city blocks until you get down to the corner at Centennial Olympic Park Drive. Cross that street, then walk around the World of Coke to reach the common Pemberton Plaza entrance.

From Peachtree Street: Unless you have the lungs of a hyper teenager, do NOT use the hilly Baker Street to access the museums from Peachtree. Instead, the Atlanta Streetcar loop from Peachtree Center MARTA Station takes you across the street from Centennial Olympic Park, where you can continue by walking on flat land to the museums on the right. The one-way streetcar loop continues from there to the Edgewood and Sweet Auburn sites (like the MLK historic site, a perfect pairing for an all-day civil rights tour). So to save some time returning to Peachtree, walk up John Portman Boulevard (where the Streetcar stop is). Between the museum entrance and Peachtree, it’s just over a ten-minute walk in either direction, with John Portman Boulevard being much more scenic than Ivan Allen Boulevard.

 

Links:

http://www.civilandhumanrights.org/

https://www.worldofcoca-cola.com/about-us/pemberton-place/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/arts/design/national-center-for-civil-and-human-rights-opens-in-atlanta.html?_r=0

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/14621407/atlanta-hawks-hold-inaugural-diversity-symposium

 

~lw3