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| - All in all, it's a good museum of southern history post-Civil War. It's a lot more about Charlotte than we'd expected, which is ok if Charlotte really is emblematic of the New South. An interesting question I came away with is: What is the "New South"? Is it whatever "new" things happened after the Civil War? Is it what we have today? Is it an aspiration for the future? I'm still not sure, but am enjoying chewing on that thought.
I have two major critiques of the museum's storytelling, described below, but all-in-all I liked the museum and would recommend it.
One thing that I found troubling was the celebration of exploitive lenders. I understand that Charlotte is a banking city and much of the funding for the museum probably came from bankers, so it didn't surprise me that the museum celebrated Charlotte bankers' exploitation of legal loopholes to create the too-big-to-fail banks at the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. BUT, it floored me that the museum attempted to justify the FORTY PERCENT interest rates that general store owners charged sharecroppers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, trapping them in an endless cycle of debt!! The museum placard said that these store-owner business men were forced to charge such high interest because they were taking on tremendous risk by lending to poor farmers. And, I kid you not, in three following panels the museum tells stories of white male owners of general stores that were able to turn the profits of their little general stores into ownership of banks and factories! Clearly, they were just getting by charging 40% interest!! (I hope the museum will investigate whether or not their interpretation of this history is, in fact, ahistorical. It should be easy to check. If general store bankruptcies were not frequent and general store profits were high, there would be no reason to believe that these businessmen were "living on the edge" when charging such high interest rates. In which case, it is ahistorical to suggest that they were forced by economics to charge such high rates. Furthermore, it would be crude to celebrate the three white store owners who flipped their general store profits into banks and factories. They were actually extortionists, profiting off the Klu Klux Klan terrorism that kept sharecroppers from demanding better lending terms, access to property ownership, and other reasonable things.)
When the museum updates their 10 minute introductory film, I hope they will reconsider their portrayal of the reconstruction era. There is no mention in the film of the brief period in which blacks *did* hold elected office (and did incredible things like start public school systems that served every citizen!) before a wave of terrorism led by educated and plantation-class white men erased the gains courageously fought for and realized for seven years under Reconstruction. Instead, the film just makes a single sad mention of how blacks struggled to gain a voice in governance - with no mention that what made it "a struggle" was violent white-led terrorism. You'd be forgiven for leaving the theater thinking those black strugglers just must have been employing the wrong strategy. Too bad Ghandi and King hadn't come along yet, right? I'm not saying the film needed to include a graphic expose of lynchings or something. There are many tactful ways it could have acknowledged the fact that black people's capacity for quality governance and leadership was fully demonstrated during reconstruction (even if it was not full realized) and that it was the *success of white terrorism and race-bating* that erased that gain, not a *failure of black struggle*! (To be fair, their is a section of panels in the museum that explain all this, but its absence from the introductory film is lamentable because that is the only place the museum can guarantee it has the attention of every museum visitor. It's far too easy for people to see the exhibit with the Klu Klux Klan cape, think "I already know about them" and move on without digesting the full import of the gains that the KKK erased.)
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