unflinching look at history

Who we are, how we got here

Refurbished Levine Museum of the New South brings home our region's heritage

By RICHARD MASCHAL

A Ku Klux Klan hood topped with a red tassel. A cotton gin once owned by the Rea family of Mecklenburg County. A rendition of "Mill Mother's Lament" composed by union organizer Ella Mae Wiggins.

A milk bottle from the Graham family dairy farm where young Billy grew up. Merchant William Henry Belk's straw hat. "Ease My Troubled Mind" by the United House of Prayer for All People's Clouds of Heaven Band.

These are some of the artifacts filling the Levine Museum of the New South. They represent the kind of detail and historical grasp that make this facility something Charlotte hasn't seen before - a place where its story is told in all its richness, fullness and pain.

This is especially important in a community that has made much of its Revolutionary War past, but not much of the period when the city as we know it was formed - the New South.

This era, from the end of the Civil War to the present, gets a close examination in a renovated uptown warehouse that reopened as a museum on Oct. 13.

The war's devastation brought profound economic and social change. This thread - along with the bumptious optimism that is Charlotte's hallmark - winds through the core exhibit, "From Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers."

You enter it off the brightly lit lobby, past the sweeping staircase and through a rather nondescript door giving little hint of what's inside. Here are genuine artifacts linked to a story with historic sweep. But the museum keeps the focus on the people who made the changes and whose lives were changed by them.

Past a theater with an orientation film, the museum's willingness to confront tough issues becomes clear. A re-creation of a tenant farmer's shack shows the grinding poverty that once marked this region.

Nearby is the purple-lined hood of a Klan member. And near that, covered by a warning about the disturbing image beneath, is a photograph of the lynching of two black men in Cabarrus County in 1898.

The museum also tackles the textile strikes of the '20s and '30s, the fight for child labor laws and the modern civil rights movement.

Drawing on recent scholarship, the museum does not mince words, for instance discussing "Creating the Myth of Reconstruction." This is the obsolete idea that after the Civil War irresponsible freed blacks and their scalawag Yankee allies overran a prostrate South.

A moving artifact: the desk and chair of F.A. Clinton, a black S.C. state senator elected to four terms beginning in 1870. The museum is especially good at presenting the history of African Americans.

Confronting difficult subjects doesn't mean the museum is heavy, or one-sided. The museum celebrates the region's pleasures - the sense of community, importance of family and good food, the ethic of hard work and progress.

At the center of the core exhibit is a two-story Main Street, with replicas of buildings such as a Belk store where you can try on vintage hats and a chapel where you can hear religious music from the black and white traditions.

While it may look like it at first, Main Street is no Disneyesque distortion. As much as possible in each exhibit, the museum works to close the gap between visitors and history, to make it come alive.

You hear the racket of a cotton mill, the clang and screech of trolleys on Main Street and the whap of a screen door closing behind you as you enter a textile mill village house.

You can press buttons and see and hear video displays (all with Spanish subtitles). You can try to card cotton fibers or pick up a handful of the stuff on which the wealth of this city was built.

At every step are the people who made the changes happen. Some are prominent but forgotten: D.A. Tompkins, an industrialist who was the Hugh McColl of the 19th century. Others are anonymous - the textile workers sitting on a mill house porch.

The core exhibit loses energy at the end. The civil-rights section is text-heavy. The last section, on banking and the future, lacks focus. That's a hard story to tell because much of it is invisible - all those checks being cleared at the Federal Reserve Bank branch.

And here's one place the attention to people doesn't work. Seeing the athletic jerseys of a young Hugh McColl and Ed Crutchfield doesn't tell us much. A final video with people known and unknown talking about the South is fun.

The core exhibit, along with upstairs space for changing exhibits, are wrapped in a $9 million renovation designed by Wagner Murray Architects.

The building is bright and welcoming, with a new entrance facing Seventh Street. The Charlotte architects chose materials such as limestone, glass, wood and aluminum that give the facility a contemporary but warm look.

The building was a simple two-story box. Would it have been better to tear it down and build a new structure from scratch? It would have cost more, but perhaps been a smarter long-run choice.

But as is, the museum is a significant addition to the city's cultural scene. It is indispensable to understanding who we are and how we got here.

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New Look at History

WHAT: The Levine Museum of the New South, 200 E. Seventh St.

HOURS: 10a.m.-5p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-5p.m. Sunday.

COST: $6 adults, $5 for those 65 and older and ages 6 to 18, free for those 5 and under.

PARKING: 90 minutes free in the adjacent Seventh Street Station deck, all day Saturday and Sunday and weekdays after 5p.m.