Wadsworth Museum

Last Friday, my classmates and I visited the Wadsworth Museum.  As we arrived outside the museum I had not realized the size and elegance of the building located in the middle  of the city.  entering the building I noticed the four stories of art in a much bigger building than I first suspected.  Each room was filled with different kinds of art from portraits to landscapes to statues.  When we arrived at the Frederick Douglass exhibit I had no idea what I was going to be learning about, but one picture really caught my eye. The picture ” Gone With The Wind”  from the show Gone With the Wind depicted a privilege white american women being helped getting dressed by an african american women who seemed to be her maid.  This picture really emphasized the distance African Americans have come from being the maids to now being equal.  The civil rights movement really pointed out the way whites treated African Americans even out of slavery as helpers. This movie really depicted slavery in the wrong way getting almost all the details wrong which also shows the desire by whites to cover up the real history and story of the African Americans. This picture also showed how African Americans can be famous and become publicly known.  The women in this picture, Scarlet O’hara, was the first black actor to win an academy award.  A few questions that really stuck in my mind were,  Why don’t other bigger museums use this kind of exhibit to portray the history of African Americans and further the cause of the African American movements and what were some images that the civil-rights movement used to further their cause or was it just write down or protests?

-chayne bruneau