MR. MARC FISHERWelcome back, I'm Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi. What do parliament Funkadelic's Mothership, Nat Turner's bible, Louis Armstrong's trumpet and a biplane used to train to ski airmen have in common? They are all items acquired for display in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture which will open on the National Mall in 2015. President Obama broke ground for the new museum on the mall, this week. But curators have been hard at work on the museums contents and design for years.

MR. MARC FISHERWhat is the right approach to such a varied, troublesome, glorious and dramatic history? Which stories demand to be told and which have to be set aside and who is the museum for anyway? To discuss all of that, we have with us today, John Franklin. He's the director of partnerships and international programs at the African-American History Museum. And welcome, this is obviously an enormous undertaking with hundreds of years of history to be told, all in one building. What is the governing philosophy? How do you find the right blend or the right mix of the trauma of the African-American past as well as the achievements and accomplishments?

MR. JOHN FRANKLINWell, this museum is undertaken with the understanding that you cannot understand American history and culture without understanding the major role of African-Americans in all regions and in all time periods of the American experience. It's an opportunity for us to see American history and culture through an African-American perspective.

MR. JOHN FRANKLINWe felt that we have to have a historical framework for this experience, and so we are a museum of history and culture, and we will look at the history of what is now the United States from roughly 1500 to the present. And in doing so, we must realize that in addition to the British colonial experience, there's the Spanish colonial experience, the French colonial experience, the Dutch and Danish, all of whom have different contacts with Africa and bring people from different regions of Africa to different regions of the United States.

MR. JOHN FRANKLINSo it will be a multi -- it will be an international perspective. One of the roles of this museum is to situate the African-American story in a much broader international story, not only dealing with Europe, but this is a part of the Americas that received under a million Africans, whereas the Caribbean and South and Central America received many more Africans over actually a longer time period way into the 19th century.

FISHERAnd so when you sit around thinking what are we going to say in this museum, part of the conversation certainly has to be who is this for, who are we reaching with this. What's your sense of who the audience will be, both racially and by age group, and how do you, as you draw up the plans for exhibits, how do you try to appeal to different audiences?

FRANKLINWell, it's a national museum, and so it's a broad audience that comes, and a significant part of the audience is a foreign audience that comes to Washington to see Smithsonian museums. A significant component of all Smithsonian visitors are school groups, and when you're preparing complex information, you realize that you have young people who are perceiving this, and so it has to be accessible to them. In addition to the exhibitions on history and culture, there will be a children's exhibition space as well, particularly designed for two to 10 year olds looking at this history and culture from a very young perspective.

FRANKLINRacially, the majority of visitors to the Smithsonian are white American, and so it will be a museum that will be accessible to people with deep knowledge of the subject matter, regardless of their background, as well as people who are unfamiliar with the material presented.

FISHERIf you'd like to join our conversation, you can call us at 1-800-433-8850. We're talking to John Franklin from the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and one of the issues that's come up in museums, and particularly in Washington over the last 20 years, is this question of what some have called the Balkanization of the Mall, where we went from having a Museum of American History to now also having a Museum of the American Indian, a Museum of African American History and Culture, some would include the Holocaust Museum in there as a museum specifically about one group of Americans.

FISHERIs there a conflict between the kind of story that would be told in an African-American museum, and the same story being told in the American History Museum? Would you take a different approach?

FRANKLINI think it's a matter of complimentarily. It gives you an opportunity to go much more deeply into a subject than, I think, a specific museum that you might do in another museum. It's not just the American History Museum that looks at African-American history, but all of our art museums, our American art museums, our portrait gallery, have segments about the African-American experience or African-American authors.

FRANKLINBut this will give us an opportunity for a deeper analysis. In addition to the history sections of this museum, there's a major focus on culture and all of its manifestations, and much of what is viewed, both within the United States and outside the United States as American music, is music that comes out of the African-American experience, whether it's classical music, sacred music, popular music, and this is music that is accessible to a very broad public, regardless of their background.

FRANKLINWe see this when we do festival programs, when the museum produces folk like festival programs such as we did on African-American music. It's something that attracts a broad audience. It's of interest to a broad audience, and people feel that it is part of their experience regardless of their background.

FISHERAnd as you planned this museum, you're obviously wanting to tell the whole sweep of African-American history from slavery all the way up to today having a black president, and along in there, as you mentioned, there's music, there's science, but there are also perhaps some areas where there are stereotypes about African-Americans and their achievement in entertainments, their achievement in sports. Do you want to celebrate those kinds of achievements or downplay them and instead focus on achievements in perhaps more serious areas of science, of academia and so on.

FRANKLINWell, with museums, there's always issues of balance. As I said, it's a museum of history and culture, so we will look at music, but not all of the expressions that you might think of. Americans are much less familiar with African-Americans in classical music, whether it's 18th, 19th, or 20th century and so there will be information that you will expect, and then information that you do not expect.

FRANKLINWe're also going to take the approach as a national museum of looking not only at different time periods, but different regions of the United States. People assume that the majority of the African-American experience is in the south or the northeast. We're going to explore African-Americans in the west, whether it's Oklahoma in the 20th century, or California during the gold rush and involvement of African-Americans there. So there will be both the stories that you expect, and the surprises.

FISHEROkay. Let's go to Harvey in Bethesda. It's your turn, Harvey. You're on the air.

HARVEYOkay. My name is Harvey. I personally think the expenditure for this museum is a vast waste of money. How many different ethnicities are in our country, and why to select one ethnicity and spent a vast fortune when the many of the black population in the United States are below the reading par what should be. We're not having a museum for Jewish people who (unintelligible) Jewish. We're not having one for Irish, we're not having one for this.

FISHEROkay.

HARVEYPeople worried about...

FISHERAll right, Harvey. We got your question. Obviously, there are those who opposed to the idea of separate museums for different groups. I think Harvey went a bit farther than that, but I mean, you've heard that kind of criticism, I'm sure. What is the reason to have a separate museum rather than include all of this story in the American History Museum?

FRANKLINWell, the Smithsonian is 165 years old, and if you look at the Museum of American History, which evolved out of an earlier museum, there's actually not much in the present Museum of American History on the African-American experience. Slavery is dealt with tangentially. The arrival of African-Americans from different regions is not mentioned at all. The challenges of segregation and slavery are no longer part of that museums exhibitions.

FRANKLINAcross the nation, African-American museums came into being because mainstream museums did not tell the story either at all, or not completely. And this is significant enough part of America's history that we feel all visitors in the United States and coming from abroad, need the opportunity to understand the story in a much more complete form.

FISHERAnd President Obama, at the groundbreaking yesterday said that this museum should serve not just as a record of tragedy, but as a celebration of life. So obviously there is this enormous story to tell, and the question that comes to my mind is how you go about telling it, and you have two very different models on the Mall now. You have the American-Indian Museum which presents a view purely form inside the Indian community.

FISHERIn fact, they got a lot of criticism for the curators kind of stepping back and allowing each tribe to tell its own story, whether that was rigorously checked or accurate or not, it was their perspective, versus say the Holocaust Museum where you have a much more rigorous academic approach, where you kind of put it all out there in detail and let people absorb and challenge and dispute. Is there a particular road that the African-American Museum is going down?

FRANKLINWell, our exhibitions are always based on scholarship, and the most up-to-date scholarship as possible. In addition to our curatorial teams of historians and anthropologists and art historians, we have a scholarly advisory committee that my late father used to chair, which makes sure that we have a broad range of perspectives, and the most up-to-date information on the different subjects that we're contemplating.

FISHERYou mentioned your father. We should point out that your name, John Franklin, may be familiar to some of our listeners, though you go by John Franklin, you are in fact John Franklin, III, and your father John Hope Franklin, who passed away two years ago, was an extremely respected and well-known historian. So in many ways you grew up with the ambitions of this museum.

FRANKLINRight. I'm actually John Wittington Franklin.

FISHEROh, okay.

FRANKLINMy mother's family name is my middle name.

FISHERSo no numeral then.

FRANKLINIt's okay. But I grew up seeing how initially African-American history was minimal or left out of our history books, and I saw my father battle to get the African-American stories immersed and enmeshed in American history. It was viewed as marginal. It was viewed as insignificant, or it was absent. And in the museum world, we face the same challenge. People come to recognize museums as the truth, as places were the truth is told, and the Smithsonian has a particular responsibility as the national museum to tell a story that is verifiable as an accurate, as well as accessible.

FISHERAnd George in Washington has a question about that truth and how the museum will handle it. George, you're on the air.

GEORGEYeah. Hey, thanks for having me on. You know, throughout my whole life, I've heard about how blacks have overcome and all the things we've done to do it, and what we were under, but what you don't hear about is the slave man's mindset, and all the evil and nasty things that the slave owner did to the slaves. And what I'm feeling, and the questions that I'm hearing from the audience is that a certain population in our country is scared to have that story told, and are you gonna tell that story, and are you gonna be authentic with that story?

GEORGEThe rapes, killing, the separation of families. The reason why blacks or light skinned, yellow, brown, red, are you gonna have all that story, our relationships with Indians, Mexicans? But generally what we don't talk about in this country is how it is the white man was allowed, and his mindset, be so evil to another race of human beings on this planet.

FISHERThank you, George. Great question. How do you deal with the tough brutal kinds of history?

FRANKLINWe have to deal with violence at all time periods. Violence as a means of social control, violence in the bringing of people from Africa to the shore first, of Africa, and then the floating prison that is the slave ship, and then how you maintain prisons right here in Washington, D.C., private jails that held Africans until they are sold to new owners and taken to either urban or rural destinations.

FRANKLINWe have to look at violence in the 20th century. We're looking at the rights against black communities in the so-called Red Summer of 1918, 1919. We're looking at the Tulsa Race Riot. We're looking at lynchings. We have the casket in which Emmett Till was displayed to the world after he was beaten and killed and put in the river, and his mother displayed his body for all the world to see what had been done to her child.

FRANKLINIn previous exhibitions we have gallery space in American History. We've shown this violence, both attacks on civil rights workers, on students, on children. We've shown the photographs of Emmett Till, and we have to deal with the brutality of the African-American experience. As in the Holocaust Museum, to the youngest children, I believe they need not be exposed to that at the earliest age, but as adults, they will be.

FISHERAnd so will there be the kinds of facilities that the Holocaust Museum has where certain extremely graphic images are displayed so that only adults can see them?

FRANKLINWe haven't made that decision yet, but we're sensitive, particularly in the creation of this two to 10 year old space of it not needing to have the violence that students will learn about later in life.

FISHERWell, thank you for that call George. Now, let's go to Ben in Kensington. Ben, you're on the air.

BENHi. I was calling first of all to say how happy I am that this new museum will be opened. But I was wondering what the -- I was walking through the Museum of Natural History the other day, and it's strange how you walk immediately from an exhibit on early man to an exhibit on African culture, and I was wondering first if you could comment if you knew of the origins of why this exhibit is located there, and second, if this was any motivation opening the new museum.

FISHERThanks.

FRANKLINIt's not a motivation for the new museum. That's quite a separate story. And the story of the Africa hall at Natural History actually would warrant its own show. I've observed that. The exhibition that was in that space prior to the current iteration, was an exhibition from the early 1960s that was very limited in its approach, and it had some aspects for which the Smithsonian, I think, was rightly criticized.

FRANKLINIts location has not changed. The Human Origins Hall was always adjacent to the African Hall, and museums are like real estate. The spaces are fought over.

FISHERAnd every decision gets analyzed extremely closely by the audience. Here's Peter in Washington, very quickly, with our last call. Peter, you're on the air.

PETEROh, yes. I'm a Whitetail from Silver Spring, and I personally can vouch for John Franklin. We used to ride the bus together all the way out, and he would -- just due to his cordiality and friendliness, I learned more about the Smithsonian riding that bus than any other representative of that great institution managed to teach me in the last 30 years. But so...

FISHERQuickly, your question.

PETERYeah. My question is, I have artifacts that I would like to donate to the museum. Who should I contact?

FRANKLINYou can reach through our nmaahc.si.edu, and you can call the Smithsonian as well, and they'll direct you to our curatorial team.

FISHERTerrific. We will have that link for you on our website if you'd like to follow up on that. And John Franklin, is there -- in the few seconds we have left, is there one artifact you can tell us about that you think people have just got to see?

FRANKLINI would say it's the materials from Harriet Tubman. We're so fortunate to have artifacts that belonged to her and that reflect her life.

FISHERWell, we're looking forward to that. John Franklin is director of Partnerships and International Programs at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African-American History and Culture. "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" is produced by Brendan Sweeney, Michael Martinez, Ingalisa Schrobsdorff, and Tayla Burney with help from Kathy Goldgeier and Elizabeth Weinstein.

FISHERThe managing producer is Diane Vogel. The engineers, Andrew Chadwick, Timmy Olmstead and Kellan Quigley. A.C. Valdez is on the phones. I'm Marc Fisher of the Washington Post sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi. Thanks for listening.