Telling the story of the African American experience in Washington - The newest museum on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), turns the impossibility of its mandate into an asset. Faced with the task of representing the breadth of African American experience within a space that would serve as both museum and monument, the curators have focused on the individual and the personal. Among the thousands of artefacts on show, those that speak loudest are those that, like the tiny amulet in the form of shackles displayed alongside child and adult slave shackles, invoke the individual’s response to tremendous forces of oppression. Inscribed
