Living in America - eye to eye, station to station

Living in America - hand to hand, across the nation

Living in America - got to have a celebration…

You might not be looking for the promised land,

but you might find it anyway.

—James Brown, “Living in America”

Black patriotism has always been a complicated thing. It’s hard to love a country that doesn’t love you back. Perhaps this Presidents Day will be different.

Wander into the presidential gallery at the National Museum of American History, and this is what you will see: A timeline sprawling over a giant, curving wall. Stretching across it are portraits of pale presidential faces, from George the first to George the 43rd. And then, over there, way at the end, is the decidedly brown visage of Barack the 44th. It’s a visceral hit; a visual confirmation that the past is indeed prologue, and the present has only just begun.

There, visitors stop, stare, pose for pictures with the presidential headshot. This impromptu photo-op, say the black folks who work at the museum—the curators, the historians, the security guards—isn’t something that you saw before. People just didn’t pause to pose with say, Warren G. Harding or Grover Cleveland, or even old Abe, celebrating his 200th last week. This, they say, is something different. A first. A shift.

“You can feel the enthusiasm,” says Reuben Jackson, 52, the museum’s associate curator and archivist. “It’s not some old white guy with a powdered wig.”

“I call myself a black man who’s still got anger issues,” Jackson continues, “which provides its own loneliness. To see young people here, unpoisoned by racism” is really powerful. [WATCH related video of Jackson.]

Back in ’76, Ebony acknowledged the complexity of black patriotism, posing the question: Should Blacks Celebrate the Bicentennial? (The answer: A qualified maybe.) Long before that, there was Frederick Douglass, who declared, "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."

You don’t have to be African and American to parse the nuance in Michelle Obama’s much-pilloried declaration that she was, for the first time in her adult life, really proud of her country. But it sure helps.

And yet, on one level, Barack Obama’s election has unleashed a certain pride in patria among African Americans: Witness the scores of black folks peacefully bum-rushing the Mall since early January, waving the American flag. Grinning.

What does black patriotism look like at a time when African Americans find that they are, as comic Wanda Sykes cracked, now The Man? When we look back, will this Presidents Day have meant more than a three-day weekend and super sales in February? Will African Americans claim a certain agency now? Will they see the presidency as part of a government that is, to coin the phrase of a hip-hop clothing line, for us, by us?

Military folks, of course, have always waved the flag, even when representing for a distinctly separate-but-unequal soldiery. But for many black Americans, flag-waving wasn’t a part of the cultural zeitgeist.

“I think we had it in us,” says Barbara Payne, who’s been working as a security guard at the museum for the past eight years. “But it’s coming out now.”

Before Obama was elected, she says, the war and the economy weighed heavy. “You could see that people were depressed,” she says of the museum visitors. Now, she says, you see more people of color popping into the presidential exhibit, as well as visitors from around the world, from Australia, to India, to Africa.

“It feels like a family picnic in here,” observes Lindsey Washington, another security guard who works in the presidential gallery.

But picnics come to an end. It’s a given that President Obama will disappoint even those most enchanted by him. Reference Lincoln’s line about not being able to please all of the people all of the time. It’s part of the job description.

“[Obama’s] brought more confidence and pride [to black Americans],” Washington says. “But to me, it doesn’t matter what color he is. He’s a man elected to do a job. And now we will see.”

Patriotism or not, it’s always nice to have a day off to spend at the museum.

Teresa Wiltz is a senior culture writer for The Root.

WATCH related video.