Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100 Year Mission to Create the National Museum of African American History and Culture
On this episode, Judge Paul Friedman of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia sits down with Judge Robert Wilkins of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to talk about his book Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100 Year Mission to Create the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
As his book title indicates, attempts and failures to build a museum dedicated to African American history date back more than 100 years. Judge Wilkins played an integral role in making the museum a reality.
Paul L. Friedman
Judge Paul L. Friedman was appointed United States District Judge in August 1994. He graduated from Cornell University in 1965 and received a J.D. from the School of Law of the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1968. Following law school, Judge Friedman clerked for Judge Aubrey E. Robinson, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and for Judge Roger Robb of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
He served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1970 to 1974, and as an Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States from 1974 to 1976. Judge Friedman practiced law as an associate and partner with White & Case from 1976 until 1994. He served as President of the District of Columbia Bar from 1986 to 1987, and as Associate Independent Counsel for the Iran-Contra Investigation from 1987 to 1988. He is the Secretary of The American Law Institute and a member of its Council.
Robert L. Wilkins
Judge Wilkins was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on January 15, 2014. A native of Muncie Indiana, he obtained a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1986 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989.
Following law school, Judge Wilkins served as a law clerk to the Honorable Earl B. Gilliam of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. In 1990, he joined the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he served first as a staff attorney in the trial and appellate divisions and later for several years as Special Litigation Chief. In 2002, he joined the law firm of Venable LLP as a partner, handling white-collar defense, intellectual property and complex civil litigation matters. During his tenure with the Public Defender Service and in private practice, Judge Wilkins served as the lead plaintiff in Wilkins, et al. v. State of Maryland, a landmark civil rights lawsuit that inspired nationwide legislative and executive reform of police stop-and-search practices and the collection of data regarding those practices. Judge Wilkins also played a key role in the establishment of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (opened in September 2016 on the National Mall), serving as the Chairman of the Site and Building Committee of the Presidential Commission whose work led to the Congressional authorization of the museum and the selection of its location. As a practicing lawyer, he was named one of the “40 under 40 most successful young litigators in America” by the National Law Journal (2002) and one of the “90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years” by the Legal Times (2008). On December 27, 2010, Judge Wilkins was appointed United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, where he served until his appointment to the D.C. Circuit.
In Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100 Year Mission to Create the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Robert L. Wilkins tells the story of how his curiosity about why there wasn't a national museum dedicated to African American history and culture became an obsession-eventually leading him to quit his job as an attorney when his wife was seven months pregnant with their second child, and make it his mission to help the museum become a reality. Long Road to Hard Truth chronicles the early history, when staunch advocates sought to create a monument for Black soldiers fifty years after the end of the Civil War and in response to the pervasive indignities of the time, including lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the slander of the racist film Birth of a Nation. The movement soon evolved to envision creating a national museum, and Wilkins follows the endless obstacles through the decades, culminating in his honor of becoming a member of the Presidential Commission that wrote the plan for creating the museum and how, with support of both Black and White Democrats and Republicans, Congress finally authorized the museum. In September 2016, exactly 100 years after the movement to create it began, the Smithsonian will open the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The book's title is inspired in part by James Baldwin, who testified in Congress in 1968 that "My history… contains the truth about America. It is going to be hard to teach it." Long Road to Hard Truth concludes that this journey took 100 years because many in America are unwilling to confront the history of America's legacy of slavery and discrimination, and that the only reason this museum finally became a reality is that an unlikely, bipartisan coalition of political leaders had the courage and wisdom to declare that America could not, and should not, continue to evade the hard truth.
For a transcript of the full episode, please contact communications@ali.org.
