Sitting Still Activism: 'African-American Portraits'

"LET YOUR MOTTO BE RESISTANCE: AFRICAN AMERICAN PORTRAITS" is the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The brick-and-mortar museum doesn't exist yet, but if this show of photographs — on display at the National Portrait Gallery and drawn from the museum's collection — is any indication, the NMAAHC is going to be one impressive addition to the Smithsonian.

Anchored by the words of teacher, preacher, editor and abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet — who urged "the slaves of America" to "Let your motto be resistance!" — the show illustrates various forms of the push-back over the past 150 years.

According to NMAAHC's director, Lonnie G. Bunch III, as the photographs were assembled, "it was clear that they revealed, reflected and illuminated the variety of creative and courageous ways that African-Americans resisted, accommodated, redefined and struggled in an America that needed, but rarely embraced and accepted, its black citizens."

From familiar snapshots like that of Martin Luther King Jr. with his wife and daughter, to infuriating images of the scarred back of an escaped slave, each shot serves as a reminder that opposition can come either in the form of Frederick Douglass taking pen to paper or Louis Armstrong blowing his trumpet.

» National Portrait Gallery, 8th & F streets NW; through March 2, free; 202-633-8300. (Gallery Place-Chinatown)

» View an online companion to the exhibit here.

Harry Belafonte photo by Herschel Levit, courtesy National Portrait Gallery