Facing Down The Status Quo

African American Museum's Inaugural Exhibition Shows The Stalwarts of 'Resistance'

There's electricity in the air. Sarah Vaughan is in the room. So is Lionel Hampton, Bessie Smith and Ray Charles. Present is Willie Mays. So are Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jessie Owens and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

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And looking over this celebrity lineup are Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is slowly lifting the curtain on how it will approach the multitude of stories about African Americans. The museum is years away from opening on the Mall. Today its first exhibition opens at its Smithsonian sister the National Portrait Gallery, whose rich materials it scoured to present images from the past 151 years.

"Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits," surveys 100 photographs, from a 1856 ambrotype, an early technique of photography, of Douglass to a 2004 snapshot of musician and composer Wynton Marsalis with a microphone in front of him, not a trumpet.

The faces are powerful and gorgeous. Their poses telegraph dignity and warmth. Their stories tell how they made steps forward as individuals to forge an image of a resilient, talented people.

Sarah Vaughan, the jazz vocalist, is dressed for the best of stages, in a bejeweled gown, one shoulder lovingly exposed. Josef Breitenbach, the German-born photographer and teacher, captured a moment in 1950 when Vaughan was lifting her arms just so, perhaps to add some balance, her eyes closed tightly in a reverie, as she let loose with "Tenderly." Dorothy Dandridge, the acting siren of the 1954 "Carmen Jones," leans into the camera of Philippe Halsman, the Life cover specialist. Dandridge's skin glows against satin. She made her strides as the first black nominated for an Oscar in a leading role, but her beauty and sensuality limited the roles she was offered.

Maybe beauty is a stretch for Jimi Hendrix, the rock genius, but Linda McCartney, photographer of the rock scene, found a teasing flirt in dark clothes and a thick, wiry halo, chewing on his sunglasses.

Sometimes, through the hallway and six galleries of the show, the dignity is etched quite clearly, and quietly.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, sat for Addison N. Scurlock in his famed Washington studio. It's a side view with the sociologist's eyes downcast, deep in thought, prompting the viewer to wonder if this was the reflection that led to the declaration: "An American, a Negro . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

Both Paul Robeson, the singer and political activist, and James Weldon Johnson, the writer, were captured by Doris Ulmann, who snapped the high-class citizens of New York and the residents of Appalachia. Both, in dress suits, are sitting, but not still. They seem to want to say something to the photographer. On the other hand, George Washington Carver, the scientist, is so immersed in his laboratory that one wonders whether he noticed that Prentice H. Polk, the official photographer of Tuskegee Institute, had framed him as one element in a delicate panel of bottles, light and human figure.

But the organizers want you to stop at the portraits and hold fast to the theme of resistance. What difference did each of these people make to the whole struggle of black people in the 19th and 20th centuries?

"While it is important to celebrate those who forcefully confronted racial inequality, this show posits that African Americans resisted in a myriad of ways: from nonviolent protests, to recapturing control of their public image, to proving their worth by seizing middle-class norms and by simply recognizing that surviving is often the highest form of resistance," said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the African American Museum's founding director.