A dream come true

(by Lee Cowan, CBS News) – …Music legend Quincy Jones, 83…has worked with the likes of Michael Jackson, and has 27 Grammys to his name, as well as an Oscar. But Jones’ latest task is pretty daunting.

He’s producing the dedication ceremony for the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

The story he has to tell is nothing short of the tale of black America.

“The big challenge,” Jones chuckled, “is the ‘what, who, why,’ because there’s a big story to tell there.”

As many as 20,000 people are expected to descend on the Mall to watch President Obama cut the ribbon at the dedication ceremony on September 24th.

Jones is on the museum’s council, and has been working closely with founding director Lonnie Bunch to help collect items of both musical and cultural significance.

“There’s not a future without a good past, a good knowledge of the past,” Bunch said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do.”

“He’s had his fingers on sort of American culture for 60 years,” Bunch said. “I find myself pinching myself saying I’m sitting here with Quincy Jones — oh, my goodness!”

Bunch showed Jones a few of his “favorite little things,” including Sammy Davis Jr.’s tap shoes, “from when he was a baby.” …

Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The museum’s 11 massive galleries display, in total, more than 30,000 priceless artifacts.

There’s a lot of space to fill — the museum is 400,000 square feet, 60 percent of which is underground.

The lower floors present a darker tale — a segregated rail car; shackles used to enslave a child; and the casket of Emmett Till, the young boy whose lynching in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.

And there are the stools from a Woolworth’s lunch counter where black students were refused service, and so refused to leave.

But make no mistake, Bunch says: This is not (nor was it ever intended to be) the National Museum of Discrimination.

“For me, the African American experience is an experience not of tragedy, but of unbelievable belief — belief in themselves, belief in an America that often didn’t believe in them,” he said.

Few items better represent that sentiment than a P.T. Stearman bi-plane flown by the pioneering Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. …

There’s also Chuck Berry’s ‘73 Cadillac, Carl Lewis’ Olympic medals, and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves.

“We had to say, let’s tell the story and find the balance between the stories that are going to make you cry, and the stories that are going to make you smile,” Bunch said.

Which is why Quincy Jones makes such a valuable resource for Bunch. He, like so many others, have succeeded in the face of enormous obstacles.

“When you come from the bottom, you never forget it. Never,” Jones said.

He was born in Chicago in what he calls one of the biggest black ghettos in America. He lived for a time with his grandmother, a former slave, and — while touring the South with jazz great Lionel Hampton — experienced first-hand the sting of racism.

“We get to the biggest church in town, from the steeples of one of the big churches there, they had a rope and an effigy of a black dummy hanging off the top of the steeples,” Jones said. “You remember that to this day?” CBS’ Lee Cowan asked. “Hell, how you gonna forget that?” Jones replied.

By the 1950s he watched some of the greatest entertainers on the Las Vegas Strip being cheered on stage, but scorned off it: “Belafonte, Lena Horne, Sammy, they couldn’t even go into the casino. They had to eat in the kitchen. Getting $17,000 to star in a show, and go back to a black hotel on the other side of town.”

Few pushed and pulled harder to legislate a home for the museum than civil rights icon John Lewis. At the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor), Lewis said, “If you believe in something, you have to stand up and fight and push and pull.”

Lewis introduced a bill for the museum every year for almost 15 years, met with continued opposition. “There was just some feeling on the part of one or two,” Lewis said. “But there was one particular member, the late Senator Jesse Helms, each time the bill would come up in the Senate, he would put a hold on it. Every single time.”

It wasn’t until 2003 that President George W. Bush signed bipartisan legislation getting the ball rolling. But it would be another nine years before construction on the museum began….

Cowan asked Lewis, “What’s it going to be like for you walking through those doors the first time?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m going to try to hold it. But I’ll probably cry.  It is my hope that it will make America a better country, and make our people a better people.”

Perhaps it already has. …..

Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from CBSNews. Visit the website at cbsnews .com.