Comment on New Smithsonian museum chronicling black history opens

WASHINGTON – Centuries of struggles and strife, decades of planning and pain, and years of hoping for a place that African-American history can call home will culminate as President Barack Obama officially opens the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. A shining bronze beacon on the National Mall, only steps away from a monument dedicated to a slaveholder president, the new museum will chronicle the complex relationship between the United States and a people it once enslaved, and tell the story of those who worked to make the necessary changes to bring the country to where it is today. “It doesn’t gauze up some bygone era or avoid uncomfortable truths,” Obama said in his weekly radio and internet talk.