African American

National Museum of African American Music Is Getting Closer to Opening In Nashville: Details

A museum, two decades in the making, centering on African-American musicians is finally getting close to opening its doors in downtown Nashville in the coming months. As the National Museum of African American Music inches closer to its $50 million funding goal and construction workers labor away to complete the permanent interactive space, H. Beecher Hicks, III, president and CEO of the NMAAM, is anticipating what’s to come.

The influence that Africans Americans have had throughout the history of American music will be chronicled throughout the space in five permanent and temporary exhibits, and a 200-seat theater. According to plans that were unveiled late last year in the Tennessean, the museum space will occupy 56,000 sq. feet and will include artifacts such as “a leopard-print dress once worn by Whitney Houston to Nat King Cole's argyle sweater.” The museum, first conceived of in 2002 and which has hosted events to honor the likes of Nile Rodgers, Patti LaBelle, Charlie Wilson and Kirk Franklin over the last several years, boasts Darius Rucker, CeCe Winans, Keb'Mo and India.Arie as national chairs.

According to Hicks, the permanent exhibits will take visitors from the influence of slavery on American music through present time. It will include “Wade in the Water,” a gallery on religious music that highlights the 1940s-1960s; “Crossroads,” an exhibit on blues and the Great Migration; “Love Supreme,” a gallery on the emergence of jazz; “One Nation Under a Groove,” an exhibit about R&B, funk, techno, disco, go-go and more from the 1960s-1990s/early 2000s; and “The Message,” a space dedicated to hip-hop from its early iterations to today.

Hicks says the museum has met about 75 percent of its fundraising goal and construction on the museum will be completed at the “very end” of 2019 with the museum slated to open either later this year or in early 2020. On Feb. 19, the museum announced it was $1 million closer to its goal thanks to a joint gift from the Regions Foundation and the Mike Curb Foundation.

Next week, the museum expects to release rates and information for members of the community who would like to become “founding members.”

As the museum finalizes its plans, Hicks spoke to Billboard about what to expect.

Billboard: Why Nashville?

H. Beecher Hicks, III: Why not Nashville? Nashville really is America’s music city. We like to say that if you look at it from a little bit of a historical presence, Nashville and Tennessee are like the crossroads of American music. Really, it was born in the South and then at the end of slavery and the beginning of The Great Migration, when our grandparents began to migrate North, whether they were going to Detroit or New York or Los Angeles, they very possibly went through Tennessee. So they left breadcrumbs in Memphis and left breadcrumbs in Nashville and breadcrumbs in Johnson City. Tennessee really, in so many ways, is kind of the crucible center of American music, even though in more modern times it’s been more prominent in other cities. We’re just bringing it back home.

What will the first temporary exhibit be about?

It will be on the Fisk Jubilee Singers and their impact on funding for [Historically Black Colleges and Universities]. In particular, the chorus and glee clubs that are such an important part of the HBCU experience.

You’ve partnered with a few artists, such as Darius Rucker and India.Arie, to get this done. How important were those partnerships for the museum?

We certainly make lots of friends along the way. Like anything else that you’re creating, it’s the one-on-one relationships [that matter]. You kind of get together with folks to kind of see and tell the story. You help them understand what’s in it for them, what’s in it for the culture [and] what’s in it for the community.

Black music has touched every genre of American music. How do you decide what goes into this museum?

We’re very fortunate that we have a skilled staff and a really skilled group of consultants that are working with us. We started out going to ethnomusicologists and music scholars around the country several years ago and asking them to tell us their stories of the music that African Americans have the most impact on around the nation. That was sort of boiled down into a storyline. Then we brought on a senior scholar, a woman by the name of Dr. Portia Maultsby, who is [the lead ethnomusicologist at the museum]. We have since hired a staff of curators who are experts in their own right in blues, jazz and in public history.

Virginia voters — including African-Americans — have Northam's back

New surveys suggest Gov. Ralph Northam’s political standing has stabilized since a poll a week into his blackface scandal showed Virginians equally split on whether the governor should resign. | Steve Helber, Pool/AP Photo

Virginia

A pair of new polls show the embattled governor seems to have weathered his blackface scandal.

By STEVEN SHEPARD

02/20/2019 09:08 AM EST

Updated 02/20/2019 09:23 AM EST

Wed Feb 20 09:23:57 EST 2019

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appears to have quelled any widespread public clamor for his resignation in the wake of his blackface scandal.

Two new polls out Wednesday show pluralities say the Democrat should not quit or be forced out over a racist photo that appeared on his medical-school yearbook page 35 years ago. Most African-American voters agree that he shouldn't go, according to one of the surveys.

Story Continued Below

In a Quinnipiac University poll, 42 percent of voters say Northam should resign — but more, 48 percent, say he shouldn’t. White voters are split evenly — 46 percent say he should resign, and the same percentage say he shouldn’t — but a majority of black voters, 56 percent, say Northam should not quit.

Even fewer Virginians say Northam should resign in a second poll out Wednesday, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs for the University of Virginia Center for Politics. In that poll, which surveyed adults in the commonwealth, only 31 percent say Northam should resign, compared to 43 percent who say he shouldn’t.

Both polls show scant support for impeaching Northam. In the Quinnipiac poll, only 26 percent say Northam should be impeached, while nearly two-in-three voters, 65 percent, say he shouldn't. In the Ipsos/U-Va. poll, just 21 percent say the General Assembly should remove Northam, while 56 percent say state legislators shouldn't impeach the governor.

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Both new surveys suggest Northam’s political standing has stabilized since a Washington Post/George Mason University Schar School poll a week into the scandal showed Virginians equally split on whether the governor should resign.

Northam, elected in 2017, has spent nearly three weeks in damage-control mode, ever since the photo first emerged on Feb. 1. Initially, the governor apologized for his appearance in the photo, which shows a person in blackface standing next to another individual dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe. But within 24 hours of his first apology, Northam said he did not believe he was one of the two disguised people in the photo, and he did not know how it came to appear on his page in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School class yearbook.

Despite his denial, most Democrats in and outside of the commonwealth called for Northam’s resignation. But he has remained defiant — bolstered in part by Virginia’s one-term limit for governors, which prevents him from seeking reelection, anyway, and scandals surrounding two other statewide Democratic officials: Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and state Attorney General Mark Herring.

“Virginia also needs someone who is strong, who has empathy, who has courage and who has a moral compass,” Northam said in an interview with CBS News last week. “And that's why I'm not going anywhere.”

More Republicans than Democrats say Northam should resign, according to both new polls. In the Quinnipiac poll, 33 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of independents say Northam should quit — even though Democrats (80 percent) are more likely than Republicans (62 percent) to say they consider blackface to be racist.

In the Ipsos/U-Va. poll, 20 percent of Democrats say Northam should quit, compared with 43 percent of Republicans.

The scandal has taken a toll on Northam’s approval ratings, the new polls show, though they have not cratered. In the Quinnipiac poll, 39 percent of voters approve of the job Northam is doing, while slightly more, 43 percent, disapprove. In the Ipsos/U-Va. poll, a plurality, 44 percent, say they neither approve nor disapprove of Northam’s job performance, compared to 17 percent who approve and 34 percent who disapprove.

One factor boosting Northam’s chances of surviving is the continued support of black voters, who made up roughly 20 percent of the electorate in his 2017, off-year victory over Republican Ed Gillespie. In the Quinnipiac poll, twice as many black voters approve of the job he is doing versus disapprove, 49 percent to 24 percent. About a quarter of black voters in Virginia, 24 percent, say Northam is racist, but a 63 percent majority say he isn’t.

Northam’s position has also been reinforced by the controversies around Fairfax and Herring — the two men next up in Virginia’s line of succession for governor. Two women have accused Fairfax of past sexual assaults, including Meredith Watson, who outlined in a Washington Post op-ed this week her call for a public hearing into her allegation that Fairfax raped her when they were students at Duke University in 2000.

Herring, meanwhile, admitted he, too, wore blackface at a party in 1980 while attending the University of Virginia — even though he had, days earlier, called for Northam’s resignation.

Of the three top Democrats, the new polls out Wednesday show Fairfax may be in the most peril. While a plurality in the Quinnipiac poll say Northam shouldn’t resign, and a 54 percent majority say Herring should remain in office — voters are split on Fairfax: 36 percent say the lieutenant governor should resign, and 36 percent say he shouldn’t.

In the Ipsos/U-Va. poll, more voters say Fairfax should resign, 35 percent, than say he shouldn’t, 25 percent. But roughly a third, 34 percent, say they aren’t sure.

The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted Feb. 14-18, surveying 1,150 registered voters in Virginia by landline and cell phone. The margin of error, including design effect, is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

The Ipsos/U-Va. poll was conducted online from Feb. 15-19. In that survey, 636 adults in Virginia were interviewed, and those results have a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

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River Road African American Museum vows to be a constant source of healing, education

Hambrick says it was a struggle to get the community engaged, seeing an ancestor’s name on a bill of sale hit home for some, but suddenly, they were hit with a chance for change. In 2002, the big house burned down. The museum was in a different building, so their collections weren’t damaged. However, the museum was forced to find a new home, making the move somewhat rewarding.