Renowned activist and public figure Tavis Smiley, is going on tour....Tavis Smiley’s America I AM national tour is billed as “the biggest, baddest, boldest exhibit ever to tell the story of the African American contribution to the country.” According to RollingOutMagazine, Tavis has a unique way to show America what being black is all about...

Tavis Smiley’s America I AM national tour, now at the Atlanta Civic Center, is billed as “the biggest, baddest, boldest exhibit ever to tell the story of the African American contribution to the country.” America I AM: The African American Imprint is an enormous 15,000-square-foot exhibit taking up every inch of the cavernous Civic Center. The comprehensive exhibit runs June 12–Sept. 6, and features more than 200 artifacts in 12 galleries and four theaters.

A central, and incredibly emotion stirring, feature of the assembled artifacts are the actual “Doors of No Return” from Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, West Africa. Captured Africans who went through these doors were never to return to their native shores as they began the perilous Middle Passage voyage to the Americas. Smiley gathered the various elements comprising the exhibit from donated sources across the world and it includes everything from Baptist hymnals to Ray Charles’ sunglasses.

“The great black intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois once asked ‘would America be America without her Negro people?’ I think that this exhibit does answer that question. We know the answer to that and that is an emphatic ‘no.’ There is no way the country could exist,” says Smiley, the talk show host, best-selling author and speaker. “The question is: how do you put together an exhibit that tells that story, that celebrates that, that revels in the humanity of a people who made the country what she is without casting aspersions on other folks, without demonizing other folks? And that’s the beauty of this exhibition.”

When Smiley conjured up the idea three years ago, he sought out AEI (American Exhibit International), the people who assembled the acclaimed Titanic and King Tut exhibits. He then procured the services of curator John Fleming, who subsequently retired from the Cincinnati Museum Center just to become executive producer for America I AM. To subsidize the exorbitantly high cost of the traveling mobile museum, Smiley secured financing from intercontinental conglomerate Walmart, to underwrite the entire four-year, 10-city tour of the country. Exxon subsidized transportation and fuel for the tour and Microsoft came on board to provide technical and computer support.

“[America I AM] celebrates unapologetically the contributions that we have made to make this country what it is. We celebrate Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States. But we recognize that there is s a 400-year backdrop that makes it possible. He didn’t just get created out of the ether. He didn’t just drop out of the sky. [We have] 400 years of significant contributions to make this moment possible for us to celebrate today,” Smiley says. “We know so well the story of America, of the immigrants coming to Ellis Island. It is a powerful story, a necessary story. America would not be [what it is] without that story. But there is another story. And America I AM tells that story.”