The state-of-the art IAAM – which opened to the public last month after 20 years of organizing and $100m in fundraising – enters a crowded commemorative landscape in one of the country’s pre-eminent tourist destinations. She came to the museum with high hopes to see those happenings reflected in the exhibits. “I wanted to see what I went through, what I lived through,” she continued, referencing the tumultuous years of Jim Crow: white people shooting into her former family home on Percy Street downtown, the integration of the city’s Burke high school, the Charleston hospital strike of 1969. McKinney, who’s 71, was not just speaking of the truth about slavery’s violence – which has often been minimized in Charleston’s historical sites – but also about more contemporary injustices. Her mother was in a different state of mind: “I’m here just to see that the truth is being told,” she said. Shaylyn, who self-identifies as Gullah Geechee (McKinney does not), told me she couldn’t wrap her head around the possibility that she may have been walking in the footsteps of her forebears. The mother and daughter know there’s a chance their enslaved ancestors may have arrived on or near the museum’s grounds, built on Gadsden’s Wharf, which received thousands of captive Africans on slave ships. Meanwhile, the elder McKinney moved toward the museum’s Center for Family History, where the pair plans to seek help from in-house genealogists to find out more about their Charleston heritage.
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