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Ne\gteit 1 a He Museum's price is now $60 million CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - Organizers of a black history museum hope to raise $60 million for the project, including $10 mil lion for an endowment to provide grants to organizations for pro grams in black history and culture. Clyburn "1 know it s a lot of money, said U.S. Rep. Jim Clybum. D-S.C., chairman of the museum steering committee. "It's going to be tough, but we're going to gel there." The original price of the museum was pro jected at $40 million. That figure increased as plans for the museum, which will be located near the South Carolina Aquarium, have evolved. The museum is expected to open in three years. The planning committee approved an ini ?tial plan for the themes of the International African American Museum. Those themes will include spirituality, expressiveness, and the struggle between freedom and slavery. TTie museum, as now envisioned, will include three main gal leries. The first will deal with the period before the early 1 700s, focus ing on life before slavery and the slave trade. The second gallery will encompass the period from the early 1700s and the end of the Civil War, examining slavery and abolition. The third gallery will deal with the struggles since the war to achieve civil rights. Harvard University Law School starts institute to study race and justice BOSTON ( AP) - Harvard Law School plans to establish an insti tute to study race and the law, and examine issues such as voting rights, affirmative action and criminal justice, the school announced last week. The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race ami Justice will be named for a Har vard Law School graduate who trained late Light-skinned blacks cannot avoid color prejudice either BY HAZEL TRICE EDNEY NNPA CORRESPONDED This is the second of a two part series on color prejudice. WASHINGTON - Akia Dickson, a student at Howard University, was headed home from work on a Washington, D.C.. subway last month when a 25-year-old brown-skinned black man slid into the seat beside her. "This guy was trying to talk to me. And he was saying, 'Oh, 1 bet you have a boyfriend." And I was like, 'Yeah.' And he was like. 'All the prettjlight-skinned girls doT^II I need in my life is a pretty light skinned girl,'" recounted Dickson, 23. "And I said, "Are those your only requirements? You need to look a little deeper than this.' I was very nice and I explained to him, 'This just can't be it.'" But the interloper was not deterred. "He said: i try to date brown skin girls, and it just doesn't work out. And I brought one home one time and my grandfather said I'd better not do that again.'" Dickson was dumbfounded. "1 was like, 'Are you serious? They still make you?'" Yes, even in 2004, African Americans still have a color com plex, explained Julia Hare, a psy chologist and executive director of the Black Think Tank in San Francisco. "It's alive and thriving," said Romero Hare. "Black men, when they went to professional schools like Meharry or Howard, the thing that assured that they would be suc cessful to themselves was a Cadil lac and a light-skinned woman on his arm. She was an ornament on his arm. It was to be sure that his children would be socially accept able and that his children would not look like him, to suffer the same punishment that his dark skinned sisters and his mother suf fered." That suffering has its roots in slavery, when the white slave master showed prefer ence to light-skinned slaves, giving them jobs as "house Negroes" while their dark-skinned counter parts labored in the fields. And more often than many people would like to admit, slave owners and their sons would take sexual liberties with defenseless black women, producing near-white offspring that were neither acknowledged nor accepted by the slave owner's family. "You would have thought that this thing would have ended after the so-called free movement and slavery supposedly was over," Hare explained. "But black peo ple have taken on the same pat terns as the slave master. Wherev er you go, I dorv't care if it's in the church, I don't care if it's in the bar, I don't care if it's in the cor porate'rooms, I don't care if it's on a cruise, color still comes up among black people." Photos by Hazel Trice Edney Tiffany Reynolds' mother is black and her father is white. She says her blackness is often questioned. Dickson, a Chicago native with natural blond hair and gray eyes, argues that being light skinned does not make her immune from insults. "In Chicago, they'd say stuff like 'light skinned,' 'blondie,' 'goldie locks' and all that stuff. They think it's like a compliment almost. But it's not a compliment. It does not flatter me at all. I think it's so ignorant." And some members of the See Color on A9
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