The African American museum will celebrate heroes of emancipation like Harriet Tubman.There will be items that lift the heart-alongside exhibits on lynchings, and other brutalities and indignities perpetrated on blacks for much of the last century.Visitors will also see the original coffin that contained the body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy murdered in 1955 in Mississippi because he was reported to have wolf-whistled at a white woman.The coffin was deliberately left open at Till's funeral in Chicago by his mother,so the world could see the atrocities visited upon her son.The public outrage that followed gave powerful fresh impetus to the civil rights movement.
　　The story of black America, for better and worse, is part of the story of all America.Even so, some see the new museum as part of a worrying trend, the subtle atomisation of a country that has always prided itself on being a sum greater than its disparate parts.Now,they worry, it's not so much e pluribus unum, （"out of many one"the phrase on the Seal of the United States）, but Ex uno plura （"out of one, many"）.As the Virginia Congressman Jim Moran puts it:"I don't want a situation where whites go to the original museums,African Americans go to the African American museum, Indians to the Indian museum and Hispanics to the Latino American museum.That's not America."

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